God Says No

by James Hannaham

  “This has been the happiest day of my life,” Miquel said. It wasn’t the sort of thing Miquel ever said, so I believed him and gave him a short hug.

  “Me too,” I echoed.

  On the other side of the wooden building sat a comfortable amphitheater, about half-full. Onstage, a children’s theater troupe was acting out the story of a lonely whale. A mean ship captain with a peg leg chased the whale with a harpoon. Everybody cheered when the captain missed and the whale ate him up. Then the whale was happy in the big blue ocean. He swam and swam. Everyone shouted, “Yeah, whale!” After the show we waited around and Miquel and I spoke to the actors.

  One of them introduced himself as Jack. He had pale skin, dark floppy hair, and Asian eyes. Without asking I tried to figure out if he was part Samoan. Jack and I talked about theater for quite a while. He turned out to be the troupe’s director. I tried hard not to notice his athletic body and his filled-out tights. I asked him, almost as a joke, if Six Flags needed a mime troupe, and to my surprise he told me they were doing a search at that very moment. Jack passed me a business card and Miquel practically dragged me away.

  Of course, he accused me of flirting with Jack and ruining our special anniversary day. I didn’t want to spoil things further, so I apologized, but that meant to Miquel that I admitted to the flirting, so he kept saying nasty things to me. The nasty things made me want to confess everything I had to confess, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead I made threatening statements about things I could say but wouldn’t, in order to spare him. He dared me but I didn’t take the bait.

  When we got home, Miquel boiled rice and fried chicken for supper. He continued to dress me down for the flirting. Then I backtracked, saying that I hadn’t been flirting but hadn’t wanted to upset him by arguing that I hadn’t been flirting. That upset him more. “That’s a lie on top of a lie,” he said. “That’s, like, a layer cake of lies.”

  He was really getting my goat-no, a whole herd of my goats. I begged him not to ruin the day more than it had already been ruined. But once he started to ruin things a little, Miquel would always make an effort to ruin things completely. He broke down in tears and demanded that I move out. I told him his tears said that he didn’t want me to leave. He told me that he knew better than me what his tears told him. I begged him not to break up with me. He said that moving out didn’t have to mean breaking up, but I didn’t believe that. At the end of the fight he tried to make love to me, but I folded my arms and my body wouldn’t respond. Part of me thanked the Lord for my lack of excitement, but another part wanted to weep at how much I had lost.

  The summer passed, and my sexuality didn’t change at all. Gradually, it set in that the Lord wasn’t going to turn me straight, maybe ever. The whole fantasy I’d kept locked in my head for the last year crumbled as soon as reality touched it. Up until the time expired, I had used every ounce of faith I had to convince myself of what the Lord’s signs had shown me. An important part of that strategy was never mentioning it. My attraction to Miquel had faded, but for other men it had actually increased. I admitted to myself that I really had been very attracted to that Jack fellow.

  Taken together, these revelations meant I had misinterpreted all the Lord’s signs. I had screwed up my entire life. I felt the dreadful disappointment that comes from believing something will happen and then suddenly realizing that it won’t, that you’ve fooled yourself. For the first time since college, I skipped church for weeks. I stopped taking the bus over to the Stop Suffering Church. Maybe a couple of the Spanish ladies missed me for a week or two, but they must have gone on with their business, like folks do.

  At home, I watched TV constantly. That kept me from having to relate to Miquel. He seemed relieved. We said only pleasant things to one another, and never had deep conversations, especially not about us. It became real comfortable, even. Sometimes he made comments suggesting that I should leave, but he never laid down the law.

  One of my temp jobs, at a bank downtown, took me on as an administrative assistant, so I worked steadily. In the evenings, I rehearsed with Concerned Relatives, who had started working on another piece. This one was called Omd, which meant “baptism in still water” in Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Rex said it would explore the empty ritual of religion. This sounded like a satanic theme to me, but I had started to go over to Satan’s side a little, and August had gotten there a while ago, so I let myself enjoy it.

  This time Rex demanded an even more intensive rehearsal period. We didn’t get any nights off. During rehearsals I went through the motions, but my thoughts remained in the doldrums. I gave Rex Jack’s card and told him about the need for a mime troupe at Six Flags. Rex took it, flipped it through his fingers, and nodded when I explained where it came from, thanking me, but when I asked later, he didn’t remember and said he’d have to find it again.

  At one of the lower points of my depression, in February of 1994, I started walking home so that I could visit public places and do things with men again. Piedmont Park became one of my favorite haunts, and I started visiting public bathrooms again. In those places, guys mostly did quick stuff, almost never the famous thing. That activity always required the kind of close attention you’d give to a science project. So I never had to deal with that. I thought about going to bars, but I only wanted a moment of release and then to go home to Miquel.

  During this sad time, I got an unexpected phone call.

  “August, I need to talk to you.” It was the cigarettey voice of Dakota Wong. She called on a Saturday when Miquel was at Over the Rainbow. I was so surprised to hear from her that I agreed to meet, even though I knew Rex considered her an enemy for quitting. She said what she wanted to talk about was urgent. I thought she might want to rejoin the company and needed advice about how to approach Rex.

  Dakota didn’t want to meet in a place where Rex or anybody we knew might show up. So we met at a fast-food restaurant in Stone Mountain, just off 1-85, with a lumberjack as its mascot. The interior of the place was all white, except for the red seats, which were attached to the chairs and swiveled like rides in an amusement park. I ordered a couple of burgers, jumbo fries, and a large Coke. When the food came I chose a seat in the window where I could watch the highway and the comings and goings of the patrons until Dakota showed up. Fast food made me feel good until I thought about where it went on my body, so I made an effort not to think about that.

  Soon Dakota arrived. She brought a salad in a plastic box to our table. She put the salad aside, pulled a manila envelope out of her shoulder bag, and set the envelope down on the table in front of her. Somehow that blank surface made me real nervous.

  “August, do you know a woman named Lisette Franklin?”

  “No,” I said. I couldn’t imagine what this was about, only what I didn’t want it to be about. “But I hope nothing happened to her.”

  “Lisette is a friend of mine from college. She joined the theater company I started after I left Concerned Relatives. We weren’t so close before, but we’ve become very close. One night after rehearsal she told me that she was involved in that train derailment that happened a couple of years ago. Someone pulled her away from the wreckage. That man’s name and picture appeared in an obituary. But when she recovered some of her memory, she remembered seeing him run away from the wreck. Lisette is very spiritual, so for a while she thought that the man’s ghost had helped her, or maybe even Jesus Christ. Then she did some investigation on her own and discovered that they’d found the man’s wallet, but never his body.”

  My nervous laugh broke out. “That’s— That’s incredible!”

  Dakota unclasped the manila envelope and slid out a photocopy of a newspaper article. The article was a brief obituary for a man named Gary Gray. I stiffened. It listed all the basic facts about Gary Gray, like where he went to school and that he worked for Bradley Foods in the marketing department and that he was survived by his wife, daughter, mother, and father, but there was no photograph, so I was
relieved a little.

  Seeing all the facts of my old life laid out so coldly in the article cut me pretty deep, but the mistakes hurt worse, because I couldn’t correct them in front of Dakota. I hoped I could prevent the fury from showing on my face. The article said Annie had come from Guam. Near the end, they had left out the r and written “Mr. Gay.” It felt deliberate. I squirmed, but I smiled at Dakota so that she wouldn’t see the squirming.

  So much had changed since then. I hadn’t really become August Valentine, but I had definitely left part of Gary Gray behind, the part that believed in my innocence, and I knew that not everybody would be happy to have me back. I thought of that satanic ghost story where the family makes a wish for their son to come back from the dead. Then the zombie version of him knocks on the door and they can’t open it, because it’s too sickening for somebody to come back from the dead for real, so they use their last wish to wish him dead again. Maybe they’d given away his possessions and his little brother had already moved into his bedroom.

  Many times I had daydreamed about the moment when I would return to my old life. But faced with the reality, I couldn’t make one person out of August Valentine and Gary Gray. I didn’t want Miquel to ever meet Annie. Maybe everybody from my past life would be better off using that last wish.

  “Lisette saw Omd because I suggested she take a look at what was going on in town. She told me she stayed until the actors came out because she wanted to see what everybody looked like with their masks off. The cast came out and she saw you. She was sure that you were this Gary Gray person who saved her. But she flipped out and ran away. She lost her mother in that accident, you know.”

  “Oh.” I smiled and nodded, still trying to keep up the impression of somebody this had nothing to do with. I curled my toes up inside my shoes as hard as I could to keep from breaking my calm outside. This took a heck of a lot of effort.

  “All this time she has been trying to reach the man who helped her, so that she could thank him for saving her life.”

  “That’s common,” I said. “I get mistaken for a lot of people.”

  Dakota nodded with sympathy. “That’s what I thought too—at first.”

  Tensely and unevenly, I swallowed air and watched the highway. A big truck went past, loaded with pine logs and little orange warning flags.

  “But then I saw the photos.” When she said photos, I thought I might have to give up. I bumped my shoes together to keep from panicking and giggled at nothing. Dakota stared at my face very seriously and I excused myself, giggling again.

  Dakota opened the envelope again and tugged out a group of photocopies. All of them had different pictures of the man I had been on them. She spread them across the table in front of me. One of the photos came from Bradley Foods’ marketing department. Another had been blown up from a snapshot of me with Annie and Cheryl. None of it seemed quite real. But then again, neither did my life as August Valentine. It had been an ordeal to replace my credit cards and ID after the Euge man robbed me in the park. At any moment I thought I might be discovered.

  “August, you’re Gary Gray, aren’t you?”

  “You think that’s me?” I said, chuckling. “You think all black people look alike, don’t you?” I put my hands in my pockets and pulled them out, and then began to tear the wrapping my burgers had come in into long strips.

  “August,” she said sternly. She pulled out a color photograph of Gary Gray and covered up the flat-top haircut. Then she poked the picture with her index finger. “This is you.” She pointed out that the moles on his face and mine were identical, and showed me a nick on the forehead of the man in the photograph that we had in common.

  “That’s not the same side,” I said, a little less confidently. “His is on the left and mine’s on the right, see?” Why couldn’t I admit it? Maybe Dakota would help keep my secret.

  I wanted to be sure nobody in the restaurant overheard our conversation, and I didn’t want to say any of the reasons why I had left. None of them would make logical sense if I shared them. Other people wouldn’t understand. They would only make fun.

  I put my hands down on the table and pushed myself to a standing position, fixing to leave. But I changed my mind to avoid seeming rude and sat back down. My worst fear was coming true. My lives had started to overlap. I went so weak from fear I almost fainted when I sat back down.

  Dakota pulled her salad over. She popped open the box and crunched into it with her fork. “Listen. I know that people don’t walk away from their whole lives just because. There must be some reason you did this.”

  I played along, but refused to admit anything. I didn’t have another chance to keep things the way they were. I trembled. “Like I killed somebody, right?”

  “I would have a hard time believing that, but yes. What happened, Gary? Did you commit a crime?”

  “You’re like a policewoman on a TV show.”

  “No, I’m a real person, Gary. Stop bullshitting.”

  I didn’t have the strength to fight Dakota’s evidence any further. But I didn’t want her to expose me, and I was foaming mad that she was robbing me of the power to return to my family in my own time, so I still wouldn’t confess. Instead, deliberately looking toward the highway, I let out a long, angry sigh, one I’d learned from Miquel, designed to make a person feel very stupid, and said, “Please don’t use that kind of language with me.”

  After that I clammed up for a long time so I could hold on to the feeling of not confessing and of being August Valentine until the last possible moment. But I couldn’t drag the moment out forever. “Are you in touch with his family, this Gary Gray guy?”

  “No, just Lisette. But she has contacted them, yes. Actually, she’s here.” Struck dumb, I stared at Dakota. “In the restaurant. Do you mind if I call her over?”

  I took a deep breath and massaged my temple with one hand, trying to make it seem as if I was tired of the whole thing rather than scared out of my darned wits. Looking away again, I lifted a pickle chip out of a Styrofoam container and bit down on it. It didn’t even crunch. Dakota nodded and waved to somebody sitting behind my back. In a second or two Lisette Franklin joined us.

  Her face still had the same seriousness in it, but the sadness I had sympathized with on the day our fates crossed had gone. Lisette wore glasses and had wrapped a turquoise scarf around her head. She slid her handbag off her arm into the swivel chair next to Dakota and stared at me with wonder and satisfaction. The scene from the train wreck must have been playing in her memory at the same time as it played in mine. She sat down in the chair next to me and lifted my hand out of my lap.

  “Hi!” I said. “Small world, eh?”

  “Gary ... I just wanted to shake your hand and say thanks. So ... thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.” I remembered that I still had her book.

  “You saved my life. You’re a hero.”

  “Yeah, I suppose you’re right.” And you just ruined mine, I thought.

  “That was a beautiful thing you did.” She stared at me like I was a famous guy on a red carpet, and my embarrassment must have showed, so she clapped her hand against my shoulder to show her thanks. Had she knocked over my carefully stacked-up new life just for that? She continued to smile and shake her head. “Can I have a sip of your Coke? My throat is so dry. I was so excited I only just realized.”

  “Sure.”

  She leaned over, took the straw between her fingers, and sucked hard. Not much was left and she made a loud noise as she finished.

  “My mother, she was injured pretty badly in the accident, you know. She was in the hospital for a while, and eventually passed away. She was the only fatality.” Lisette managed a sad smile. I was horrified. Knowing now that somebody had really died shocked and scared me, because it made the Lord’s plan unclear. If somebody else had died, the accident couldn’t have been a message for me only. And I’d thought things couldn’t get worse.

  “I’m sorry.” I was sorry, but just as
sorry for myself, feeling as if a house made of my own lies, every lie a brick, had just toppled over on me and crushed out my breath.

  “You were the last person she ever had a conversation with.” Lisette’s voice broke slightly. “Did you know that?” She picked up one of my napkins and wiped her hands.

  “No, I didn’t know. That’s sad. What happened to you afterward?”

  “A bunch of stuff. I graduated from Temple and I live in Atlanta now.”

  “You’re still involved in theater, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m in theater, too.”

  “I know. I saw the piece. You were great.”

  “Thanks.”

  “There’s so much I want to say,” she said.

  “Thank you is enough.”

  A puzzled look crossed her face. Then she brightened up suddenly. “I have a husband and a beautiful baby boy named Lawrence now. He’s six months old. Would you like to see a picture of him?” She lunged over the table for her bag and fished out a wallet bulging with snapshots. Lisette and her husband had a lush backyard and a cocker spaniel named Frank. The pictures showed Lawrence in the playpen with a rattle, in the yard with the husband blowing soap bubbles, and with Frank licking his face. I was happy for her, but jealous at the same time. If I didn’t have samesex desires, I could have a normal life with a wife, children, a Kentucky bluegrass lawn, and a happy dog, too. I cooed extra hard to hide my bad emotions and keep her on the subject of herself instead of me.