by Chris Adrian
“Everything will be different, after you see Him,” he had said, and that was true. As Molly had tried unsuccessfully to sleep, with the Jesus swinging languidly in her mind in a fivesecond arc that measured the minutes until dawn, she tried to see how she could not have understood what he actually meant, and she pictured herself on trial before her family, with Malinda seated as judge and everyone else in the jury box, listening with impassive faces as she attempted to explain. “I thought he meant he was going to share his Jesus with me. His own personal Jesus. His experience of Jesus.” And it had been true that part of her thought this was going to be the case, and that same part had wondered what it would be like to show him hers. She could only imagine the obvious thing, opening her chest to show him the very shape of her heart.
Everything looked the same. Her father looked the same, singing with his eyes closed and strumming those same four chords on his guitar. Her mother looked the same, shimmying in place. Chris and Craig and Colin looked the same, and Clay looked the same, thrusting his chin out while he played the bass. Mary was stabbing, as she always did, at the keyboard, and Malinda was managing to open her pinched-up little mouth just enough for her weak voice to slip out. Melissa was dancing around like a fool who didn’t have a clue what was in store for her, and Peabo … it didn’t even matter what Peabo was doing. They were all hideous, and she knew without a mirror to tell her so that she was uglier than any of them. As soon as the video shoot was done, she found her father in his study and told him.
They started their tour in the auditorium of the New Calvary School, which was where they started all their tours, because it was down the street from their house and because it could be relied upon to provide a crowd that was both sympathetic and constructively critical. Though the family had technically abandoned the institution, the principal was still a good friend of their father’s and a member of their church, and he passed out evaluation forms, dutifully completed by all the students, which scored their performance from one to ten in areas like musicality and spirit and goodness of news. A week after Peabo’s departure, there was still a shadow on the performance, though Melissa was the only one who said she missed him, or that they had played better with him around, or that the music sounded different without him. “Don’t be stupid,” Malinda said. “He only played the tambourine.”
All their parents would say was that he had done something that demonstrated that it wasn’t in God’s plan for him to live with them, which was what they said about everyone who got sent back or sent away, but the children suspected it must have been something horrible, because no one before had ever been sent away after only one week. “I guess you were right about him,” Malinda said to Molly. “He didn’t last a month.” She gave Molly a hard stare.
“I guess so,” Molly said, finding it easy to stare back blankly at her sister as if she’d had nothing at all to do with Peabo’s ejection. It was exactly as easy as it was to stare blankly at her parents, together and separately, when they asked if anything else had happened besides just a viewing. Aunt Jean took her shopping, though she wouldn’t buy any of the things Molly had picked out for herself. The special attention almost gave away that something had happened to her, and Molly hid the condolence barrette that Jean had given her, after a weepy interrogation in the car. “It must have been so horrible for you!” she said, and Molly said, with perfect calmness, that it was.
They opened with “Sycamore Trees” and then played “Jesus Loves You More” before their father talked a bit to the audience. He wasn’t a preacher, but he liked to give sermons and tell stories meant to throw the message of the song into starker relief. He was saying something about choices, which led into “The Ballad of the Warm Fuzzies,” and Molly had a moment in which she thought she could hear the silence into which the voice should be speaking an insult to him. But it had been silent since Peabo left, as if it were sulking. She didn’t miss it, but she didn’t feel any better, now that it had shut up. She wondered where Peabo was. She had been succeeding fantastically at not thinking about him, though not about his Jesus, which accompanied her everywhere. It was not exactly that she could not stop thinking about it, or even that she saw it in cucumbers or carrots or bunches of bananas. It was with her in a way that was hard to describe, because nothing had ever stayed with her this way before, a permanent afterimage not perceived with the eyes.
The music started without her; she had missed her father’s cue. She started in late and settled down into an unthinking rhythm. She looked around at the audience and found herself searching for Peabo, but there were only three black kids in the whole student body and they were all girls. “Don’t you miss him?” Melissa kept asking them all. Molly could swear that she did not, but now she thought she might cry. That was okay. Her father approved of tears, though not sobs, during a performance. She missed the chorus the first time around, waiting for the tears to come, but not a single one fell, even though everywhere she looked she saw the shine and the blur of them. Her family were moving all around her, and she didn’t know why until they squared off into their fuzzy and prickly sides. They sang at her, cocking their heads as they asked if she was going to be a Warm Fuzzy, but it was clear from their faces that they were really asking what was wrong with her.
I don’t know, she tried to say, right into her microphone, but something else came out, not even a word but just a noise made in a voice that did not sound like her own voice, though it was very familiar. It was lost in the singing. The family stepped expertly back to their original positions and started the second verse. Melissa picked up a bag and started to throw Warm Fuzzies—really just plush kittens with their hair teased up and their legs cut off, bought in bulk from the five-and-dime—into the crowd. Molly spoke again, louder this time and clearer, so it might have been heard over the music if it hadn’t been lost under the noise of the crowd. “Bitch!”
Malinda turned around to glare at her and raise her hand to her lips in a gesture denoting not “Shush” but “Shut up and sing.” Molly shook her tambourine at her, two shakes off the beat. Malinda furrowed her brow and stamped her foot, which warranted another shake of the tambourine and a spoken response: “Bitch! Bastard! Bitch!” Then her mother turned around. She got a shake as well, and then Molly gave one to everyone in the family, one here and two there, and then a scattering of them for the audience. She imagined her family in the audience, and imagined herself in the audience, and imagined Peabo in the audience, and imagined his Jesus in the audience, and now she was singing to all of them. It was a whole audience of delicately curving, uncircumcised Jesuses, and each of them was asking her a question. “Fuck!” she answered. A twisted moan, it hardly sounded like the word, but it was the answer, as she shouted it, to every question she could ask. Where did he come from? Where did he go? Where had the shine gone when it disappeared off everything? What was wrong with her? The noise she was making—“Fargh! Foo-ack!”—was the answer, and then it was the question, too. She stood up straight and tall, shaking her tambourine and singing for a long time after the music had stopped.
Part Three
9
Molly was developing a relationship with the bench. She knew it pretty well already, compared to all the other benches in all the other parks in the city, because she had spent so much time on it while Ryan made his Buena Vista peregrinations, but tonight it felt like it was giving something back to her, which was what separated the really special benches from the ones you were merely friendly with. She sat on it, and then slouched, and then eventually reclined, and the longer she spent on it the more at ease she felt about never making it to the party. The more time she spent on the bench, the more it seemed like enough work—indeed, a lot of work—to have climbed this high hill, and the more it seemed like enough satisfaction to sit and enjoy the view, though the fog had closed it half an hour ago and she had spent the last fifteen minutes on her back staring up at the swirling white ceiling above the treetops.
More than that,
Benchy seemed to be saying, in his utterly sympathetic and nonoverwhelming way, that there was work to be done, here by herself, equivalent to what would have been done if she trudged out of the park and found her way to the party, if she knocked on the door and drew attention to herself as the most late arrival, if she restrained the urge to talk to everyone except Jordan Sasscock and managed to sustain a conversation with him throughout the various great rooms of his fancy house on the hill, and even if by unspoken signals communicated to him that it would be all right with her, should they find themselves alone in the library or the summer kitchen or the sunroom, if they made out a little. Jordan, Benchy said somewhat righteously, didn’t really matter at all. He was just the handsome tricycle the world meant her to pedal a few yards down the road to recovery, and once she saw that she could see he wasn’t actually necessary to the work. She could just lie here and transport herself, by force of will, those same few yards. Anyway, she wasn’t at home, and not being home alone was as important as being at the party.
Benchy agreed, not exactly speaking in a recurrence of the voice that had talked to her as a kid. It was more that the habit of listening to such voices had recurred after Ryan died, though she had a very different relationship to them as a woman than she did as a girl. The purple lesbian spoke in soothing tones, but she accused more than she comforted. Getting over it, as she stressed in her last chapters, was hard work, and hard work looked a lot more like forcing a smile at Jordan Sasscock and his friends than it looked like lying on a bench with your fingers dragging in the grass. Her friends were even more accusatory, and went so far as to suggest that any activity that did not somehow aerobically denounce her attachment to Ryan was a wallow. “A wallow by any other name,” said Gus, and Tyler added, more gently, that genuine recovery, whether it was from failed romance or grief or both, was always complicated, but a party would be good for her. “No Jesus, no peace,” said her mother, and Molly reacted like she always did when her mother brought her intrusive thoughts of Jesus, and briefly imagined giving Him a blow job. The mother in her head kept in touch much more aggressively than her actual mother did and had to be managed differently, with shocking images that frightened her away into some stale gray heaven where everyone loved one another with a perfect absence of feeling, though Molly had once in a latter teenage rage actually said, to her actual mother, that Jesus could suck her dick.
“It’s not safe here,” said another voice, which Molly didn’t recognize. She opened her eyes and sat up. It wasn’t beyond her imagination and her irrational mind to gang up on her and introduce a voice before there was a face to go along with it—that had happened with Ms. Grimace, the goofy baritone preceding the big purple lesbian’s entrance onto her mind’s stage, though only by a few moments—but this voice had sounded real. Molly looked around, but she was alone with the trees.
“Hello?” she said.
“It’s not safe here,” the voice said again. “You must come with me.” She looked up in the branches, expecting to see a park ranger or a homeless person there, but they were empty. “I’m over here,” the voice said, and then it was obvious that it was coming from one of the trees, not because there was someone lounging in the branches but because she had mistaken the speaker for a tree. He—it was a man’s voice, though the person did not look particularly male or female—was at least seven feet tall, was dressed in leaves and twigs, and looked like he was made out of string. Molly had seen any number of unusual skin conditions in her brief foray into hospital chaplaincy, so she did not initially categorize him as an impossible creature. There were children that looked like gnomes and hobbits and goblins, and seeing them and talking to them was no slur upon a person’s sanity, so he didn’t, on first glance, make her worry about hers.
“Huh?” she said.
“It’s not safe here. The Beast is loose on the hill, and we are trapped with him inside the walls of air which my Lord, in his lamentable absence and considerable wisdom, has thrown up on the borders. The Beast can’t get out, and neither can we, and oh, he is very upset!”
“Actually, I was just leaving,” Molly said.
“You cannot leave,” the man said. “My Lord has thrown up impassable walls of air. We’re all trapped. Trapped!” Molly peered at him. He was wringing his hands together and, looking closely at his arms, she could see how little stringy bits were coming off his forearms and elbows; he looked quite literally to be coming unspooled.
“It’ll be all right,” she said cautiously, because it seemed like the right thing to tell him, but also because it seemed like a good thing to tell herself. A closer look at him had made her afraid, not of whatever beast he was talking about, but of her own mind. She had spent the last two years waiting for a breakdown that never properly came: a perpetual sneaky feeling that sandwiches were going to start talking to her never matured into an actual conviction that she could talk to sandwiches; the feeling that Ryan was still around, no less a part of her life than when he was alive, never became a feeling that he really was still around; and she was always only convinced that dead was dead. He wasn’t watching her from some shining spirit abode. He wasn’t in Heaven and he wasn’t in Hell, and though she talked to him all the time she knew he wasn’t listening. And while she very actively imagined scoldings from her mother and the big lesbian and even from Jesus himself, she never actually saw those people talking to her, and when they spoke she only heard them with her mind’s ear.
On closer inspection, the thin man was a lot stranger-looking than she had taken him for initially. His eyes had a moldy glow about them, and she was reasonably sure he didn’t have any ears, and his joints seemed all out of place—his waist was too low and his elbows were too high and his neck was much too long. As unreal as he looked, though, nothing about him suggested to her that she was dreaming. Still, when she stood up she did a little jump, trying to fly, because that was the way she always tested her sleeping dreams. She’d interrupted more than one unpleasant dinner with her family, or naked classroom presentation, or uncanny and terrifying reunion with Ryan by putting down her fork or her laser pointer or her doughnut and saying, “Excuse me, but I think I can fly.” Then she’d leap up and fly away into wakefulness. She didn’t excuse herself to the man now but made a little leap, which took her nowhere.
“The walls are round on top,” he said. “They make a dome. Up is also no escape. But were you trying to fly? I’ve never met a mortal who could fly.” He said this as if trying to fly were the most natural thing in the world.
“I wasn’t …” Molly said. “I’m going to go now.”
“Exactly!” he said. “Come along.” He held a hand out to her. She didn’t really look at it. “You might not be safe with me, either. But at least you won’t be alone.”
“Maybe we could just walk together for a while,” Molly said, because she wanted to get moving but she didn’t want to make him angry. She was afraid, all of a sudden, of what she had in store for herself. She had thought it might be a relief, when her break finally arrived, because the waiting would finally be over and she would be delivered from anxious anticipation into careless fancy-free psychosis. But this wasn’t a relief.
“Very well,” he said, “as long as it is this way and not that way.” He pointed in opposite directions, crossing his arms across his chest. She started walking, across the hill to her left, and he followed beside her. “Pardon me for staring,” he said as they went, “but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a mortal up close like this. You have very nice skin.”
“Thanks,” Molly said, not looking at him. He was very interesting to look at, but she didn’t particularly want to see him close up. The closer she looked, the more real and unreal he seemed—noticing new details made her more certain she wasn’t dreaming, but revealed him to look weirder and weirder and weirder. He was, she realized, a good candidate to escort her off into lunacy. She slowed down, pausing before every step, and he gave her a little push. “Don’t …” she said, mean
ing to tell him not to touch her, but even as she said it she realized it was too late. She started running anyway, thinking that if she just tried hard enough, or concentrated hard enough as she ran, the trees would part and the fog would lift, and she would find herself shortly on Jordan’s doorstep. She hurried away down a path that petered out before she’d drawn ten heavy breaths, and then she was running among trees, ducking branches and leaping over fallen logs. It was an unchanging scene—white trees and white fog and dark wet grass—and she felt as she ran as if she could do it forever and never get any farther than the next white tree. That was not so terrible. It was nice just to be running from the awful certainty of the touch of that weird man; it was one thing to see him and hear him, but to feel him was evidence that she had finally and truly lost it. She calmed but did not slow, and understood she was running from that certainty, and that it was okay to run because here in this state of flight she could inhabit a last liminal sanity. It was okay to run—she wasn’t disappointed in herself and nothing anyone, real or imagined, could say would make her feel any differently—but sprinting through the woods made obvious just how much energy it took to run, and she started to feel tired, not just on account of the past five minutes of swift flight but on account of the whole past two years, on account of what seemed, in running reflection, like a titanic effort to stave off something she maybe ought to have just welcomed long before. What she had done over the past year had required an equivalent expenditure of energy to a year-long sprint, and when she thought of it that way it was obviously an unreasonable thing to do. Remaining sane—clinging and grasping at it, seeking to please a propriety constructed by people whose boyfriends had never killed themselves—was in fact the most insane thing she could have done, and anyone properly equipped by the right kind of experience would understand that. Funny, she thought, how all it took was a breakdown—or really just the beginning of a breakdown, since she had probably only dipped her toe in it so far—to make everything so clear.