Seeing Jesus

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  Seeing

  JESUS

  A Novel

  By

  Jeffrey McClain Jones

  SeeingJESUS

  Copyright © 2013 by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the author.

  John 14:12 Publications

  www.john1412.com

  Cover by Gabriel Jones – Photos from Getty Images, via Photos.com.

  For Norm: an extraordinary regular guy, who knows how to see Jesus in the people around him.

  Chapter One

  Philly Thompson looked through the jagged foil mouth of the instant coffee jar. He could see his chipped and stained countertop through the bottom of the clear, plastic jar. The morning had gotten off to a bad start. Philly swelled and released a sigh. He would have to break open the vault and pay four bucks for a cup of coffee on the way to work. His sigh turned into a low growl.

  “Four bucks for coffee!” he said aloud. “How did that happen?”

  Philly dropped the empty jar in the kitchen garbage can with a clunk and headed for his bedroom, stepping over his big, gray cat, Irving, who was begging for attention.

  “Hey, I fed you. Now I gotta go,” Philly protested.

  Finding his black and tan, rubber-soled shoes, he sat on the edge of the bed, his two hundred pounds inducing a quick squeak of springs. He puffed against the excess weight around his middle, as he stuffed one foot and then the other into his shoes. Two sets of rabbit ears and double knots in place, he bounced up off the bed, determined to show his invisible audience that he still possessed youthful vitality, in spite of his untamed waistline. Irving stood at the bedroom door, apparently unimpressed. He bent his head down to lick himself.

  Philly stepped over the cat again and stopped at his coat closet, pulling a tan squall jacket out of the musty assortment. He headed toward the kitchen, pulled on the jacket, scooped up his wallet, swept up his keys and slipped his phone into his pants pocket, in smooth, practiced order, only interrupting the usual choreography to lift the last corner of toast off the white, yellow and green Corelle breakfast plate on the kitchen table. On the back porch, he locked the door, noticing his hair in the reflection as he chewed his toast.

  As soon as he pocketed his keys and began creaking down the back stairway, he attempted to brush his hair from left to right with the fingers of both hands. Wobbling on the third stair above the second floor landing, he forgot about his hair and snagged the railing in time to steady himself. He swore quietly, feeling like he should have just stayed in bed.

  Walking down the uneven sidewalk between his building and the one next door, Philly followed the well-worn path away from his refuge. That refuge rested on the top floor of the three story apartment building constructed a hundred years ago. The dark reddish brick and white window frames fit it into a spectrum of similar buildings lining the densely parked residential street.

  In his mind, Philly still looked like a slimmer version of his young, twenty-five-year-old self. This was a trick he played to avoid facing his rising hairline, widening middle and late thirties pudgy face. Lately, reality checks included long hairs growing out of his ears and nose. He preferred to forget all of that, however, when walking on the streets of Chicago.

  Philly arrived at his bus stop, on Sheridan Road, in time to buy a Tribune from the vending machine. A Northsider all his life, he thought of the Trib as his paper, though he only read it a couple of times a week. He looked unconsciously at the front page, not yet ready to actually absorb any real information. He was still getting comfortable being out of his apartment, out in the cool, damp April air, exposed to the eyes of strangers, if they ever stopped thinking their own self-conscious thoughts long enough to notice the nearly six foot tall, single man with bushy eyebrows and uneven sideburns.

  Someone had told him once that he looked like Oliver Platt, the actor, and Philly clung to this assessment, though the resemblance required seeing him from a certain oblique angle and though he might have to admit that Oliver Platt was not one of the best looking actors. Still, looking like an actor, any actor, felt better than just looking like himself, a white man on the North Side of Chicago who blended into the crowds, the streets and the weather, as if he wore urban camouflage.

  The bus moaned to a stop, a hiss and squeak accompanying the opening door. Having sheltered his eyes by the blind perusal of his paper, Philly had not noticed the elderly Polish woman, nor the young Hispanic couple, standing with him at the bus stop. Only when he had to shift into mass transit protocol, did he glance at his fellow travelers, all three regulars at that stop on a weekday morning. The old woman looked at him to confirm that he was waiting for her to climb the stairs first. As usual, Philly waited for her to follow the spry young couple and he intentionally looked away, so no one would think he was staring at the old woman’s backside as she climbed the stairs. Philly devoted about seventy percent of his energy to managing what people thought of him when he was out in public. That left only thirty percent for walking, breathing and actual interactions with real people.

  Sitting on the bus, Philly had just begun to read an article about the city budget when he felt his phone vibrate for an incoming text. He sucked in his belly and stretched his leg to make his phone accessible. After a bit of struggling, he birthed the phone and confirmed the expected sender, his oldest friend, Raymond Carver, whom he still privately called Ray-Ray. That was how Philly had known him since first grade. Likewise, Ray persisted in calling Philly by that nick name, which was given him by his father before he took his first step. His co-workers, on the other hand, called him Phil or Phillip, with rare exceptions.

  While Philly worked near downtown every day, Ray sold commercial plumbing hardware and only visited downtown when needed. A trip to a client today prompted his text proposing lunch. Lunch with your oldest friend could possibly redeem a dreary day, but the prospect of lunch with Ray soured Philly’s stomach. At this point, Philly had not yet admitted to himself that he no longer even liked spending time with Ray. He texted back for Ray to meet him at a sandwich restaurant on North Wells Street, near Philly’s office.

  After his usual bus transfer, Philly arrived at his transit destination and walked the three blocks to the two-tone gray building, constructed in the 1950s, which housed the architectural firm for which he worked. He liked his commute, because it stayed above ground and required very little of him.

  Philly knew nothing about architecture. He served as the network administrator for the firm, part of a computer support staff of five. He liked his job, because he had both a boss and an assistant, which made him feel covered on two sides.

  Not until he reached the front door of the building did he remember his missed coffee. His shoulders slumped, he looked around to see if anyone had noticed his hesitation, and then he turned to walk to the fast food place nearest the office. No coffee connoisseur, he would take what he could get.

  Walking faster than usual, conscious of the time press this detour would put on him, Philly nearly knocked down an old, weather-stained man shaking a Styrofoam cup with coins in it. Philly made a note to give the old man his change on the way out, more as an apology for the near crash than out of charity.

  While he stood in line, Philly spotted Brenda, one of the secretaries who worked in his office. Brenda was his most recent girlfriend. But lately they had been, “just friends.” She had stopped accepting his invitations to dinner and movies and had dated some guy from her neighborhood for a while. That transitional relationship had passed, as far as Philly knew, but neither of them had attempted to change the
status of their relationship since.

  “Hey Philly,” Brenda said cheerfully, a lilt in her voice. She was the single predictable exception at work who called him by his old nickname.

  “Hi, Brenda,” he replied, unconsciously standing up straighter and sucking his stomach in slightly.

  “Gettin’ something to eat, or just coffee?” Brenda switched lines to stand with Philly.

  Philly genuinely liked Brenda, when she was in a cheerful mood. In that condition, she could get him to do anything, to be anybody. But she had a pretty dark interior and sometimes showed it, even at work.

  “Just coffee,” Philly said, making eye contact, conscious not to look at the tight sweater Brenda wore under her unzipped rain jacket.

  “Me too,” said Brenda, “didn’t have time to make some before I left home.”

  Brenda lived in Evanston and rode the train down from there. To Philly it made no sense to pay the higher rent in Evanston just to live in a neighborhood that looked just like his neighborhood in Chicago. But he never criticized anything Brenda did, for fear of triggering one of her grave and disgusted moods.

  Philly nodded and shuffled forward in the line, as a grandmother collected her order for herself and two tiny children. Brenda brushed a lock of her brown hair back, pausing to try tucking it into the hair pulled back tight in her pony tail.

  “You got big plans this weekend?” Brenda said.

  From this question, Philly could tell that they were more than just friends again and Brenda wanted him to ask her out. She knew what a leading question sounded like and never offered one unless she meant it.

  “Not really. You?”

  “Nope, maybe we could do something,” she said.

  That made Philly nervous. He knew what to do with Brenda’s obvious leading questions. It was like a role in a play. Her line opened the obvious invitation for him to follow with taking the ironic initiative. The play was both comedy and tragedy. However, Brenda had slipped from hinting to taking the initiative herself and she had not done that since the peak of their romance, two years ago. How could she act as if none of the intervening two years had happened?

  “Yeah,” Philly said, trying to disguise his discomfort with her bold breach of protocol. “Dinner and a movie?” he said, pulling the old standard out in order to push over the hump of awkwardness.

  “That would be nice. What’s playing?”

  “There’s that new one with Julia Roberts,” Philly said. When he had seen the trailer he had instantly thought of Brenda, a soulful Julia Roberts fan.

  Brenda’s voice bounced with enthusiasm. “Oh, yeah. I really wanna see that one. That would be great.”

  Philly addressed the cashier as they reached the front of the line. “Two coffees.”

  Brenda jumped in. “Make mine a vanilla latte.”

  Philly fished for his wallet in the wrong pocket, feeling a flash of panic and then remembered that it was in his jacket.

  “Oh, I’ll get this,” Brenda said, plunking her black leather purse on the counter.

  “Naw,” Philly said. “I know how badly they pay you, remember?” This had always been his means of persuading her to concede his manly role as provider, in a way that avoided openly admitting the gender bias, by making it into a purely practical question of economics.

  Brenda rolled her eyes, less annoyed by this subtle bullying than she was thrilled to see Philly reverting to their old patterns, as if nothing had exploded and crumbled between them. They collected their coffee and walked together to work, where they saw nothing of each other the rest of the day, but where they were never far from each other’s thoughts.

  After saying goodbye to Brenda, Philly checked in the network room, before riding the elevator up to his little office. A Tuesday, this work day faded into anonymity even as its hours passed through the morning.

  At lunch, Philly swung past Brenda’s cubicle, just to say “Hello,” but he found that she was away somewhere else in the office. His appointment to meet Ray kept him moving and the disappointment of not seeing Brenda faded quickly. His passive dread of seeing Ray sucked the sap out of any small disappointments.

  Philly walked the three blocks to lunch without a jacket for the first time that year. The evasive Chicago Spring made a cameo appearance that day and Philly even noticed the buds opening on many of the trees along the street. When he looked through the glass door of the restaurant, he spotted Ray sitting at a table and eating already, his long, oval face focused on his sandwich, so that Philly recognized him by his expensive haircut. Philly briefly considered turning around and just enjoying the marvelous weather. But loyalty had been riveted to Philly’s soul at an early age, among loud family gatherings and always-attentive neighbors. He opened the restaurant door and nodded to Ray on his way to the counter, where he ordered the tuna on toasted rye that he had been craving for the past two hours. Though loyalty drove him, the sandwich was his reward.

  Ray was taller and thinner than Philly, though he had lately developed a tummy that resembled a medicine ball implanted just above his low-slung belt. Ray had tried to keep something of the baggy, saggy pants look of his youth, even as he dressed up to his position as sales rep.

  When Philly finally reached the table, Ray put down his sandwich, scrunched a paper napkin briefly and then held out his hand.

  “Hey, Philly, good to see you,” he said, sounding the salesmen that he had always been.

  The persuasive intonation he now used in his job had been the catalyst for dozens of regrettable schemes in Philly’s childhood. Philly had hit Ray in the face more than once, in revenge for dragging him into trouble, but he had always fallen back in with his oldest friend before the bruises even healed.

  Philly sat down after shaking hands, unwrapped his sandwich and took a sip of his iced tea before saying anything. A boost to his blood sugar would sure help with tolerating Ray for a whole lunch.

  “You couldn’t wait for me?” Philly said, uncharacteristically confrontational.

  “Hey, sorry. I gotta get out to the suburbs by one-thirty,” Ray replied, not sounding sorry. “So how is the network treatin’ you?”

  Ray always asked some version of that question, as if he could only understand Philly’s job in terms of his own. Ray’s job revolved around his relationship with his customers. Philly’s job revolved around his relationship with his computer network. Though the repetitive question annoyed Philly, he couldn’t argue with the analogy. He did, however, wonder if Ray meant it in a belittling way, as if Philly were incapable of relating to people instead of electronics.

  Philly offered little more than an acknowledging grunt in response to the question, enjoying the sandwich much more than the conversation. As he sat looking past Ray, chewing contently, Philly’s phone rang. The old bicycle horn ringtone warned him that it was his mother. In most circumstances, Philly would have let her go through to voice mail. He didn’t always want to hear from his mother, expecting the call to involve either nagging or worrying, both of which he preferred to postpone. But Philly had been relying on his mother lately to keep him posted on his grandma’s condition and he suspected this call would bring him news on her health, which had been wavering since her stroke the week before.

  “Hello, Ma,” he said, just after swallowing, so that his voice sounded strange.

  “Are you okay, Philly?” his mother said.

  “Sure, Ma. Just eating lunch with Ray-Ray. How’s Grandma?”

  “Oh, Philly, it’s not good. She’s gone into a coma now and they don’t know how long she’ll be that way.” His mother’s voice swooned into a mournful tone.

  “Oh,” Philly said, not prepared for something as decisive and intimidating as a coma. That sounded too ominous to handle at lunch with Ray.

  “She’s getting help breathing, but her heart is still good, they say,” his mother said. “And they say we can still visit her, ‘cause it might help her to hear our voices, even if she can’t say anything back.” Here Philly’s
mother broke down crying.

  Though this grandmother was his father’s mother, she had been very kind and accepting of Philly’s mother from the start and had become a reliable companion to her in their later years. Beyond that, every small difficulty expanded into a grand crisis with Philly’s ma. Years ago Philly had figured out that his dad was so passive and mellow because his mother did all of the worrying for both of them. As a result, Philly had learned to interpret the world in terms of the average between his mother’s overreaction and his father’s inattention. He wondered now how his dad was taking the news about Grandma, watching a baseball game perhaps.

  “Eileen’s coming into town to see Grandma,” his mother said, recovering from her tearful torrent.

  Eileen was Philly’s sister. On a bad day, her presence meant double the nagging and double the worrying. On a good day, it meant an ally against his mother’s siege on his life.

  “Does she need someone to pick her up at the airport?” Philly’s loyalty spoke before his lurking fear of Eileen could stop it.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I forgot to ask,” his mother said. “Why don’t I call her and get back to you on that.”

  “No, Ma, I can call her myself. Thanks.” Philly was glad to keep his mother out of the middle of any of his relationships.

  Philly and his mother said their goodbyes and he pocketed his phone once again. The tuna sandwich had lost some of its appeal in the mean time. For a moment, Philly focused on his annoying mother and the further annoyance of having to tell Ray what that call was about, until he thought of his grandma.

  Grandma Thompson was the saint of the family. Literally. Not only did the woman pray constantly for all of her children and grandchildren, she managed to alienate none of them by nagging or prying. She just prayed. And Philly had always loved to sit and talk with her, no matter the generational divide. He loved his grandma and respected her more than his own parents, if one were to measure such things.