by Cami Ostman
After I finish the third immersion, I swim to where the water is shallow and walk out to the edge of the pond. The air is even colder now as I grab my towel, shuddering. I huddle inside it. Faint wafts of steam come off my body and float out into the night. I scrub my legs and torso with the towel. A fishy odor oils my skin.
In the starlight, I find my clothes lying in a heap on the dirt. My body feels warm and relaxed as I dress quickly and head toward the van. Inside, the air is stifling and thick with sweet pipe smoke. The Everly Brothers croon as I toss my towel onto the floor. “Ooh, la la . . . wake up . . . ” Before I climb inside, I take one last look at the water and the reflection of the stars, one last glimpse at the women watching over me.
Geoffrey turns to me and, coming closer than he has in weeks, gives me a peck on the cheek and squeezes my hand. “All clean?” he asks. And we rattle our way back down the lonely stretch of highway under stars that I hope will guide me, or at least illuminate the long road home.
Witness
Melanie Hoffert
So this is how it happens, I thought. My brother is lying in my claw-foot tub, naked except for a washcloth over his penis. His olive skin is turning purple and his hands are starting to curl like the leaves of a plant wilting in a time-lapse video. “Dave,” I whisper, hoarse. It is early morning, the room a sea-green hue; light is just starting to bleed through the windows. I grab the plug near Dave’s feet to drain the water, then whip a towel down from the rack so I can cover the rest of his body. This is how it happens, my mind repeats. The moment when everything gets fucked, when a life-altering event changes a family. All these years we had been spared, my parents and us four kids: all of us relatively healthy, no horrible accidents, my siblings all married now and having meaty, ripe babies. But this was it, I assumed, the moment so many people face, when something goes terribly wrong.
Dave’s eyes, ink-jet blue, piercing, are both the eyes of the person I know today—the quiet, stubborn, creative man who focuses on new hobbies, obsessively, until he masters them—and the eyes of the kid I knew so well, my companion, my little brother, two years younger, who would eat only hot dogs and kicked at the front door, inconsolable, when our parents left us with sitters.
I am the oldest of four. David was number two, and when he arrived I was ready for an ally. At night, when the house was still, I would talk to him through the bars of his crib, telling him we would always be best friends or crying to him if I had been scolded. “At least you still love me,” I would say. In the mornings, I stood in front of a long skinny kitchen cupboard that held the cereal boxes. Dave watched me with curiosity from his windup swing. Before I sat down to eat I always kissed his head, pushed the orange vinyl seat that cupped his warm diaper, and asked, “What should I have, Davey?” He could not talk back, but always looked at me with trusting eyes.
DAVE’S FACE STARTS TO lose form; his lip veers down on the left side. He looks at me like he did as a child from that swing, with eyes asking about life, trying to make meaning of the world. “I cawn’t tawlk. Loowk awt my hawnds. Wha is wrong wif me? I cawn’t strwaiten my hawnds,” he says.
“Oh God,” I whisper to myself. My heart is pounding, creating a dull thud I can feel in my ears; blood is surging through my body, like it would at the first deadfall of a roller coaster. “Dave, I’m going to get help.” I grab his tangled hands, hold them in mine, and try to reassure him. “Just breathe.” I run to my bedroom, find my phone, dial 911, run back to Dave. I tell the dispatcher to send someone, quickly, something is wrong with my brother—he might be having a stroke, or something, I don’t know. I hang up. Dave is slumped over the side of the tub now, still changing color, turning a darker purple, and trying to uncurl his hands. He can’t. He tries to talk again, now with a pause between each word. “Tell. The. Kids—” My chest aches as he starts to relay a message for my precious niece and nephew, one a baby and the other two years old. He thinks he’s dying.
“Dave,” I look into his eyes. “Dave,” I say, calling whatever part of him that can hear me to absorb my words—to believe what I am about to say. “Dave,” I say, again, cupping his face and stroking his head, “You are going to be okay. Do you hear me?” I feel these words rush through me from a primordial source within my cells. I know, with conviction, what I’m saying is true: “Dave, I promise, you are absolutely going to be okay.”
I am not referring to his body—I have no idea what is happening or what is to come. I am talking about his soul. And this is important because, thirty minutes before, he told me he doesn’t think there is a God.
I WAS TAUGHT TO be a witness in tenth grade, when the repetitive, sleepy church my family attended in our hometown of five hundred could no longer feed my growing spiritual hunger.
As a child I felt particularly close to God when I played in the trees that framed our farm. There, with sticks breaking under my feet and the moody prairie sky overhead, I knew God could hear me. Evidence abounded. When I was eight I found a wounded robin. Terrified our dog would eat her, I put on yellow rubber gloves, scooped the bird into my hands, and gently lobbed it into the air. Instead of taking flight she tumbled to the ground. I tried again and again, desperate to save her. Finally, not knowing what else to do, I knelt in the soft grass and prayed. When I opened my eyes the robin took a few steady steps and flew away.
In the church I attended as a child, though, God felt far away. Every Sunday I repeated prayers out of the green Lutheran Book of Worship, listened to the sermon, and then feasted from a spread of potluck dishes that glistened like an acre of bubbling, volcanic earth at Yellowstone. Afterward my family returned to our farm, where we shed our church clothes and napped like a pride of lions on our parents’ waterbed until our next feeding. For most of my early life this was how I understood religion: as a routine, and separate from the God I felt in nature.
As a teenager, influenced by my best friend, Jessica, I started to listen to Christian music—swoony, dreamy, enchanting music. The voices stirred a yearning in me for the sweet feeling of God that eluded me in church but that I felt in the trees. The voices in this music called to me from the world beyond my small Lutheran church. Jessica and I started to exchange Bible verses in notes too. Looking up the verse she handed me each day was like finding a secret code, leading me deeper into a relationship with God. Within months of our transformation we decided to attend a Christian youth gathering in a larger town.
The gathering was unlike anything I had ever experienced. At first I thought people acted rather strangely, walking around in an otherworldly coma, asking if I had been saved. But then I started to get into the flow of the event. Christian rock bands performed, we danced and sang, speakers preached to us about turning our lives over to God, and at breaks we gathered in small groups to talk. In these groups people wept, moved by the Holy Spirit.
This new way of experiencing God, with riveting emotion—led by leaders who identified as “saved” or “born-again” and not by a denomination—appealed to my spiritually disposed young mind. At the retreat I was awash in a love so palpable I felt as if I was being drenched in holy oil. The air I breathed was electrified, perfumed by lilacs, budding apple trees, and ripe cherries—even though I was inside. The universe seemed charged, alive, and connected to the divine. So when one of the speakers asked us to raise our hands if we were ready to recommit our lives to God, I stretched mine into the air.
That weekend I learned that what was going on at my church wasn’t enough; that the fire of the Holy Spirit needed to catch ahold of everyone I came into contact with; that I needed to be—was called to be—a witness. And witnessing was critical because, if I didn’t convince people to follow Christ, to shut off the secular world and dedicate their entire lives to God, they would be doomed, their souls destined for hell.
“DAVE, JUST TRY TO breathe slowly, okay?” I am shaking but focused. “I’m going to unlock the door. I’ll be right back.” I run down the stairs to where my other brother, Donny, the yo
ungest, is sprawled on an air mattress in my living room. My brothers are staying with me in Minneapolis for the weekend to go to a Twins’ game.
“Donny, get up!” I kick the mattress, but he doesn’t move. I run to unlock the door. Next I squat and with all my force shake the bed, all the while wondering if Dave is still breathing. “Donny, get up, something is wrong with Dave. An ambulance is on the way.”
Donny groans and rolls, “Huh? Whatever. I don’t believe him. I’m so sick of his crap,” he says, disoriented.
I have no time to explain. “Donny, this is not a joke. Get up. Hurry! And open the door when they come,” I yell as I run back up the stairs.
I am thankful to find Dave breathing, but he is still in the same position, hands curled like he’s crippled, face hanging like he has Bell’s palsy, eyes looking at me for answers.
AFTER THE YOUTH RETREAT I grew frustrated with everyone back home. Sitting idly in church, repeating prayers, and singing hymns wasn’t enough—people needed to embrace the Holy Spirit. And it was my job to show my family, my church, and my classmates the real way to God. Jessica and I organized the first ever “See you at the pole” morning at our school, where we’d gather at a designated time with others all across the country to say prayers. I also started to wear Jesus T-shirts and pin a tiny cross on my collar. At home I listened to Christian music and read my Bible. I felt like a righteous rebel for God.
During this time Dave had just entered high school. I told him how important it was to develop a relationship with the Lord. I bought him tapes of Christian hard rock groups that mimicked the music he liked. I expected him to follow my lead, as he had always done.
The boys in my class found it thrilling to target my brother with alcohol and parties as a way to taunt me, the Bible-banger. I’d hear, secondhand, about Dave getting drunk. Furious and panicked about his salvation, I asked him to consider what God thought of his behavior, reminding him of the love and peace he’d find if he lived his life for the Lord. Dave was quiet, his eyes angry.
All the while I was experiencing my spiritual transformation, I was also in love with Jessica, an inconvenience that would cause me to look at things differently in a few short years. In my mind, the love I felt wasn’t wrong because it was founded on our connection to God. I had known from age four that I was gay. And when I ran in the trees, wild and young, full of wonder and believing in miracles, I never felt like a sinner. The God I knew was the giver of this love, in fact. But the more involved I got with fundamentalist Christianity, the greater the tension grew between my feelings and what I heard from spiritual leaders. I kept my struggle hidden. As the years passed my inner world became locked in a painful struggle between the voice of the zealous leaders, who told me what God thought about same-sex couples, and my own inner voice that whispered something entirely different.
AN HOUR BEFORE DAVE got into the tub, he’d been lying next to me in my bed, and I’d been annoyed. We could have been kids again, under the covers, with a flashlight. Back then we’d be giggling and drawing pictures on each other’s arms. Or, if I felt evil, I’d be telling a scary story to bring my little brother—who believed anything I said—to tears. But we were not kids and I was tired. My brothers had come home, late, after a night out on the town.
At four in the morning they had tumbled into my house like wild buffalo. I’d stood in my robe, watching as they ravaged my fridge and—squeezing my arms, flashing their big grins—told me not to be mad. They are as close as two brothers can be and in many ways almost clones of one another: Both are handsome, with kind faces, easy smiles, big eyes, shaved heads; and they share the same hiccupping laugh. But Donny is almost a foot taller than Dave, and emotive, a big hugger, a talker; Dave is reserved, tentative about affection, usually quiet, conveying his feelings mostly via a furrowed brow.
After they had taken their fill, Donny hit the air mattress. Dave bypassed the couch I’d made up for him, followed me upstairs, and dove into my bed. I ignored him, crawled to the other side of the bed, and pulled the covers up to my nose. Whether he slept on the couch or next to me, I was intent on getting a couple more hours of sleep.
“Mel, Donny is mad at me,” Dave said.
“Go to sleep, Dave,” I said.
“But he’s mad at me,” Dave repeated. “We had a fight tonight.”
“Dave, Donny isn’t mad at you. Donny loves you. Now go to sleep.”
“No, he doesn’t. He thinks I’m a bad person.”
“He doesn’t. And you are a not a bad person. Go to sleep,” I said, hoping he would grow bored and drift off.
“Does too! What do you know? You weren’t there,” he said, whining. I realized right then that I was in bed with my four-year-old brother—the alcohol-induced version.
I sighed and decided to indulge him, “Why, Dave? Why does Donny think you’re a bad person?”
He turned onto his side, away from me. “Because I told him I don’t think there is a God. And he is mad at me. And April thinks I’m a bad person too. She’s always reciting Bible verses, asking me what God would think when I don’t want to go to church.”
With this admission I realized I was in for more than a drunken ramble. I opened my eyes and braced myself. April is Dave’s wife, a beautiful woman with an open and loving disposition. She, like Dave, can be strongheaded and stubborn. And she is a devout, faithful, deeply convicted Catholic. I have no idea what she would make of this news.
“I’m sure April doesn’t think you’re a bad person. What did she say?” I asked.
“I haven’t told her. I’m terrified. She’s sooo religious.”
“Dave, April is religious, yes—but she’s also understanding and open and a thinker. You should just tell her what you’re feeling,” I said. “It’s better than not talking. She’d probably appreciate it.”
“I don’t know how to talk about it,” he said.
“Well,” I thought for a second. “You know, Dave, just start with this: April, I need to talk to you, and I need to feel safe. I want you to hear what I’m about to say with an open heart and not judge me.” I imagined this was too soft, too mushy for Dave. I imagined he would burst into laughter—instead he burst into tears.
I tumbled inside to hear my brother crying next to me, especially since he rarely exposed his inner thoughts, much less his raw emotion. Part of me wanted to turn away, plug my ears, and not see, like I would have had he cut his finger as a child and run to Mom. Simultaneously I felt the weight of this conversation—the importance to get it right this time.
“Mel, do you think there is a God?” he asked, sobbing.
This was such a complex, tricky, loaded question. My family and I don’t often talk about God or faith. They are as devout in their routine today as we were early on. But for years they thought of me as the religious one, the one who went to a Christian college, the one who worked as a camp counselor, the one who studied each tissue-like page of the Bible, demonstrating to everyone what active faith looked like. I was, after all, on a mission to save their souls. But over the years my perspectives had transitioned; I had changed. And I had no idea what they thought about my beliefs today.
“Dave, I sort of think there is this creative energy that made us. And we are all a part of it. We are it. And I think there are many paths to understanding it, or God, or source. And all those paths, all beliefs, just lead to the same impulse. But religion has distorted a lot. I think the human translation of the divine has become harmful.”
“But you think there is something. I don’t even believe there is something. I thought when I’d have kids it would change my mind. But I don’t feel it.” He was still sobbing, pent-up contemplation leaving his body. And I was feeling sick with care for him.
“Dave, I think that’s okay. You may feel differently some day or you may not. But you are not a bad person.” I put my hand on his back, wishing the moment would pass, that the air would shift and he’d be okay. But a deeper part of me knew this release was years in
the making, and that somehow I had contributed to his pain. I also realized how much I had changed from that young witness who’d clung to dogma, on a mission to save souls.
“But everyone thinks I’m going to hell.”
“Well. Everyone thinks I’m going to hell too, because I’m gay. So we’ll be there together,” I said, hoping to make him laugh. Then I felt something—an old anger, a stirring. “Judgment, Dave, is the greatest sin in my mind. No one has a right to judge you. This is your life and your way of making sense of it.”
We talked for several more minutes until Dave calmed down. “Davey, you just need to relax. Let it go. You don’t have to figure out everything now, or ever.” I waited for his response.
“I think I’m going to take a bath,” he said.
“Ah, great idea,” I said, surprised but encouraged by the thought of him relaxing. “I’ll get it ready for you.”
I drew his bath, sprinkled salts in the water, and got out a clean towel. I thought about baptism, and communion, and Jesus washing people’s feet. At one time I’d been drawn to these rituals, these miracles, enchanted by their mystery. I remembered how when Dave and I were kids I’d smash white bread, pour grape juice, and give him communion. He watched me. He listened to me. Then more memories surfaced: the years I scorned him about his parties, and the times I told him his music was evil. I remembered how silent he’d become, and, for a time, how distant we’d been. Now, no longer trying to convert him, drawing a bath for my brother somehow seemed holy, a different kind of baptism. I wanted the water to soothe him, to wash away his fear.
After he settled into the bath I listened for the movement of water and then crawled back into bed. A few minutes later I heard his voice.
“Dave, did you say something?” I said quietly.