Seeing Jesus

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  For a moment, Philly entertained a feeling that he ought to offer Jesus a plate of the good meal, a reflection of the growing comfort he felt around his convivial companion. Jesus smiled at the thought and replied without moving his lips.

  “Thanks, Philly. But I think messing with the dog’s personality is quite enough for tonight.”

  Philly smiled but kept his eyes on his family as he did so.

  “Okay, dish up,” said Ma. “What’re you smiling at, kiddo?” She eyed Philly.

  “Oh, there’s so much to smile about,” Philly said.

  Eileen scowled at her little brother, sensing his evasion. She dished mashed potatoes and said, “Philly’s been acting pretty strange since he called me about picking me up at the airport.”

  Philly winced internally, out of habit, generally reticent to bring Ma into private conversations not edited for her consumption. But he stopped himself when he considered his plan to tell his family about his guest. He ladled gravy onto his beef and potatoes and passed it to his dad.

  “You always thought I was strange,” Philly said.

  “Oh, everyone thinks their little brother is strange, no matter how good he is,” Ma said.

  Eileen shrugged and nodded, pushing aside the green bean casserole after taking only the equivalent of six beans.

  “You watching your weight, dear?” Ma said her, noting the small portion.

  “Always,” said Eileen.

  Ma glanced at Philly, but decided not to say anything more. Philly noted the restraint and counted it a minor miracle.

  “You got nothing to worry about,” Dad said, to Eileen.

  Eileen allowed her mouth full of food to excuse her from responding to Dad. Then she looked at Blacky sitting next to the empty chair at the end of the table, instead of waiting beneath the table to pounce on scraps dropped, unintentionally or otherwise. Dad had only slightly modified his subversive feeding habit, when the veterinarian told him that he was killing Blacky with his kindness.

  Eileen spoke up. “What’s with Blacky? Did you send him to obedience school or something?”

  Ma snorted. “Obedience school? That little delinquent? No, he’s just as naughty as ever.”

  Dad had missed part of Eileen’s question, but figured out what they were talking about from the tone of his wife’s voice. “Hey, where is my little guy?” he said.

  Philly looked at Jesus, who looked down at Blacky and made a motion for the dog to go to Dad. The little terrier smartly obeyed his new master and moved to the other end of the table, where he sat next to Dad, but kept turning to look at Jesus, as if checking to see if Jesus was sure that he couldn’t return to the other end of the table.

  Looking now at the distracted dog, Dad snuck his left hand down from the edge of his plate with the requisite bit of beef. Blacky checked with Jesus before snapping up the morsel and then checked again as he licked his lips. Ma ignored the entire display, as usual, during the covert feeding ritual, maintaining her plausible deniability before the veterinarian. Eileen, however, could see enough of Blacky to see his constant attention to the opposite end of the table, wondering whether he suffered from early doggie dementia. Philly, on the other side of the table, missed the entire extraordinary exchange.

  By the time Philly had nearly finished his ample portions of dinner, the finer sensors in his nose began to detect that fractionally sour smell of a meal no longer fresh, his stomach no longer dominating his senses. He steeped in the combination of guilt at overeating and satisfaction with being filled, heightened by the iconic childhood status of this particular meal. For all the frustrations over his ma’s predictable behaviors, Philly welcomed that meal’s pull into the past.

  When all four of them began to coast to the end of their dinner, Blacky sensed Dad’s loss of interest in him and took the chance to return to Jesus’s side. Eileen shook her head at the dog’s odd devotion to an empty chair.

  “I think that old dog has gone crazy,” Eileen said. “Why’s he so fascinated with that empty chair?”

  The childhood innocence stirred by his family, along with the roast beef, weakened Philly’s defenses. He opened the door on his big secret much less discretely than he had intended.

  “Well, the trick is that it’s not really empty,” he said carelessly. Immediately, he stopped breathing, his mind rushing for an exit strategy. How could he recapture his secret after that ill-prepared introduction?

  “What?” Eileen said, leaning over to see what might be hidden on that chair.

  Philly watched lamely. Ma spoke up.

  “Well it looks pretty empty to me,” she said.

  Eileen agreed. “I don’t see anything. What are you talking about?”

  Philly continued to fish for an out. Then he looked at Jesus, who just smiled back, in anticipation. For a moment, Philly thought Jesus was waiting to see how Philly could avoid answering Eileen, but then he realized, of course, that Jesus awaited the big revelation. As had happened several times now, the look on Jesus’s face sent Philly full speed into certain disaster.

  “Well, I didn’t want to tell you like this, ‘cause you’re gonna think I’m crazy,” Philly said. “But I’ve been looking for a chance to tell you all about something big that’s been happening to me.” He sat up straighter in his chair, as if good posture might add to his credibility.

  Dad turned up his hearing aid on Philly’s side and both women stared speechlessly, the way one does when completely adrift mentally.

  Again Philly looked at Jesus for encouragement. This time Eileen recognized that gesture, something in it very different than looking at an empty chair. She could tell that Philly thought he was seeing something there. Then she noted for the first time the way the chair was pulled back, as if there really were someone sitting there.

  When Philly looked back at Eileen, preferring to make eye contact with her, instead of Ma, he saw the shock on her face. That stopped him again.

  Jesus spoke up. “Go ahead, Philly. You can do it. I’ll back you up.”

  That settled it. And Philly began with the story of visiting Grandma and asking her to pray. Then he told about discovering Jesus sitting on the bus and then following Philly wherever he went.

  When Philly finished, Ma’s brow was deeply furrowed, but she seemed unable to speak.

  Eileen said, “So you believe you’re seeing Jesus sitting there in that chair?”

  Philly glanced at Jesus, who still smiled gamely, and then took in each of his family members in a sweep with his eyes. “Yep. He’s sitting right there. That’s why Blacky’s so interested in that chair.”

  The mind-blanking shock at Philly’s story had wiped Blacky’s odd behavior out of everyone’s consciousness. Bringing the dog in as star witness stifled every response his family members had prepared during his delusional story. If Philly was delusional, then Blacky seemed to be sharing in his delusion. This is where Dad weighed in.

  “What did you do to that dog?” he said, still too shocked to decide whether he was accusing Philly, or crediting him with a clever new trick.

  Philly shrugged. “I didn’t do anything. Animals just like Jesus. Irving likes him better than he likes me and I feed him.”

  Jesus made a motion with his hand above Blacky and the dog barked at him.

  Ma looked at the dog and then at Philly. “What did you do to that dog?”

  Philly shook his head, “I didn’t do anything. It’s Jesus. I guess animals can see him, even if most people can’t.”

  “How can you be sure you’re really seeing him,” Eileen said, not knowing what the right answer to her own question would be.

  “Well, I thought I was crazy at first, but then there was this guy on the bus who was really crazy and he freaked out because the voices in his head told him Jesus was there. And he kept saying ‘Jesus’ really strangely. And then there was Irving, who loves to be wherever Jesus is. And then I told Brenda about him and he told me to say something to her that I didn’t know about, something
that happened when she was a kid, which she never told me. So Brenda believed me,” he said. Then he remembered the clincher, “And, when I was on the phone with you the other day,” he said, looking at Eileen, “he told me to ask you about your job, to prove to me that he was really there and not just in my imagination.”

  All of these bits of evidence bounced off of his listeners, who all stared at Blacky standing up on his hind legs, leaning on the empty chair, acting as if someone was scratching him behind the ears. With no logical options, his family members had to choose from the remaining illogical options, so they each veered toward the insanity plea.

  “How could you be seeing Jesus, if we can’t see him?” his mother said.

  “That’s just how Grandma prayed it, I guess,” Philly said, innocent of the approaching indictment.

  “You leave your grandma out of this,” Dad said, more forcefully than he had said anything in decades.

  That tone sent Philly searching for an explanation of his own. He looked at Jesus, who stopped scratching Blacky and appeared to relax in his chair, as if to say, “this may not be going as you had hoped, but don’t worry about it.”

  Eileen, shaking her head and huffing, said, “So you see Jesus now?” she said. “What’s he doing?”

  Philly looked his invisible friend as naturally as if he were on the phone describing someone that he saw to a person in a far away location. “Well, he’s just sitting there looking at me, a very pleasant smile on his face, as usual. He stopped scratching Blacky and seems to be waiting for us to work things out.”

  Jesus nodded in response to Philly’s interpretation of his posture and then looked at Eileen.

  “Now he’s looking at you,” Philly said.

  Eileen’s eyes swung toward the empty chair and back to Philly, retreating from the urge to look at her brother’s hallucination. Ma started to say something, but Eileen cut her off. “How do you know this is Jesus, you’re seeing?” she challenged.

  “I guess I just believed it when he told me. He knew things about me that no one else could know,” Philly said simply, not straining at the possible intellectual puzzles from such a challenge. “And he’s told me things about other people too, that all proved to be right. Who else could he be?”

  Philly had unconsciously resumed the tone of voice he had used as a teenager when arguing with his sister. Yet here, he remained free from the churning anxieties that had twisted and frayed his teenage years. Instead of hiding that internal conflict, he felt genuinely free from it, allowing a bit of space for him to feel sorry for Eileen and his parents.

  Eileen seemed to be calculating something, as Ma grabbed the floor. “Philly, you need to see someone about this. This is a serious problem. You might be really sick.” She sounded maternally concerned. Philly welcomed the brief wind of care from his ma, who generally seemed only concerned about herself. Then he realized that her concern for him could simply be worry about how his insanity would impact her, and the warm feeling vanished.

  “Okay, so if Jesus is there, and knows everything,” Eileen began, “then have him tell you who I’m dating back in New York.” The confident look on her face said that she was certain she had dashed Philly’s delusion.

  Philly looked at Jesus.

  Ma, missing the significance of the gauntlet thrown by Eileen, asked, “Who are you dating?”

  Philly ignored the interruption, but Jesus smiled at the irony.

  Answering the challenge, Jesus said, “She’s going out with Roger Peterson, an account executive at a firm that provides communications consulting for her employer. He is forty-two years old and has a wife and two children in Paramus, New Jersey. Eileen doesn’t know about the wife,” Jesus said simply.

  Philly locked up for a second, hanging on that last bit of information; but looking at Eileen’s insistent face freed him to report what Jesus had said, within a few syllables of perfect accuracy.

  Eileen’s face lost both its harsh edge and its color. She tried to speak, searching for an “I told you so” that had lost its reason for being.

  Ma barged in. “Eileen, why are you going out with a married man?”

  “Marge,” Dad said, not nearly so lost in the confusion as Ma.

  “What?” Ma said, turning on her husband.

  “How do you know he’s married?” Eileen said.

  The spin of revelations and reactions tipped Philly out of equilibrium and he sat staring at Eileen for a tottering moment.

  “He lied to her,” Jesus clarified. “He said he was recently divorced.”

  Philly parroted this additional information.

  Eileen turned red now. Her breath surged in great puffs. She grabbed her wine glass and downed the last two inches of the smoky liquid.

  She looked at Philly, hysteria in her eyes, “How,” she said. Then she just stuttered, “how, how, . . .” She even looked at Jesus.

  From Philly’s perspective, Eileen and Jesus made eye contact, but his sister felt no benefit of that one-sided encounter. She burst out crying for the second time that day, devastated by the news of her boyfriend’s betrayal and emotionally short-circuited by Philly’s miraculous knowledge. As she wept, wiping her face with a napkin and gasping for breath, the smell of those tears brought back the strange occurrence in Grandma’s hospital room.

  Eileen looked at Philly, ignoring her mother’s efforts to calm her, and said, “In the hospital today, was that part of this?”

  As a boy, Philly often pretended not to understand a question in order to delay his answer. Sitting there at the dinner table that evening, he genuinely missed the connection Eileen was making. Because Jesus had accompanied him for most of the past week, Philly overlooked the twin peaks of experience that seemed so obvious to Eileen. A glance at Jesus, however, reminded Philly of the connection. He looked at Ma and Dad and nodded.

  Though Eileen linked her two tearful experiences together, she couldn’t conceive of how Philly’s vision of Jesus had unwrapped the emotionally contained family at the hospital. Philly saw her confusion and tried to explain.

  “Remember when I went over and hugged Ma,” he said glancing at his mother. He preferred focusing on Eileen, because he sensed that Ma still drifted far from the shore of this conversation, even farther than Eileen. “Well, I hugged Ma because Jesus was hugging her and wanted me to do the same. You see, he can’t really touch people directly, he wants me to do it for him.”

  Though Philly had been slow to absorb the concept of Jesus using him to touch people, he had accumulated enough instruction from Jesus to say that much.

  Eileen furrowed her brow, still wiping at tears and still ignoring her mother’s weak protestations. “Why does he want you to do it for him? Why can’t he just touch people himself, if he’s right here?”

  Philly looked at Jesus, who seemed to be waiting to evaluate Philly’s answer to this question, like a teacher prompting his pupil to demonstrate that he had been listening and learning. Rather than the smart kid response, Philly opted for honesty.

  “You know, that part has been really hard for me to get,” he said. He turned from Eileen to Jesus again. “Apparently, this is generally how he works in the world. It’s not just me. He’s counting on people to do the good stuff he wants them to do.”

  At this, Jesus stood up from his chair. Blacky backed away to allow him space. Eileen noticed Philly’s eyes following Jesus’s movement and saw Blacky move in concert. She gasped at the natural coordination of their reactions, beginning to believe.

  Jesus said to Philly, “I want to heal your Dad’s hearing.” He arrived at the other end of table, stood with his hands ready and looked expectantly at Philly.

  Philly followed the cue. “He says he wants to heal Dad’s hearing,” he said, his voice cracking slightly at the thought of it.

  Dad followed Philly’s gaze, looking suspiciously at the space next to his chair.

  Ma said, “What are you talking about?” If she got any more lost, they would have to report her
to the police as a missing person.

  Jesus persuaded Philly. “You know I can do this, right?”

  Philly nodded, still stuck in his chair across the table.

  “Come on then and put your hands over your Dad’s ears.”

  Philly looked awkwardly around at his family and said apologetically, “He says he wants me to put my hands over Dad’s ears.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” Ma said.

  “Marge,” Dad said. “What could it hurt? You know my ma believes in this kind of thing.”

  Here, the decades-old split between the sides of the family opened again, like a hidden crevice revealed by a violent wind tearing at the pile of brush accumulated over it. Though Grandma had not latched onto her supernatural faith until late in her life, the Thompson family had been Protestant and Philly’s ma had been raised Catholic. Instead of deciding between them, Ma and Dad had simply agreed to dump them both, when they married over forty years ago. And, when Grandma Thompson had found a more miraculous spiritual life, her son had listened far more sympathetically than her daughter-in-law. One might also assume that this openness reflected the spiritual desert in the Thompson household, which left Dad thirsty enough to keep alive the possibility of something more. But no one had heard him defend his mother’s faith in all of the intervening years, once Ma expressed her suspicious disapproval. Now, a new confrontation emerged from the invisible visit of Philly’s Jesus.

  Philly got out of his chair, keeping his eyes on Dad, in case the old man changed his mind. But Dad just sat patiently, determined to maintain his open posture. Jesus nodded to Philly and then reached out his hands toward Mr. Thompson’s ears. Philly, standing opposite Jesus, mirrored his movement and gently touched his hands to his dad’s ears. For a man reticent to touch his parents, this skin-to-skin contact doubled Philly’s discomfort at the strange act.