God Says No

by James Hannaham

  “I didn’t see one when I was in there.”

  The earlier heavy mood lifted, and even though we’d be lucky to get back to Resurrection before sunup, we’d had a naughty taste of secular life without knuckling under, and we were real pleased with ourselves. Keith volunteered to go to an ATM and get cab fare as soon as Nicky got out of the bathroom and agreed to go with us. Jake bummed yet another cigarette, and by the time he finished, Keith wondered if something might be wrong.

  “What’s taking him so long?”

  “He didn’t say which thing he was going to do. And he said to remember what we were talking about.”

  Jake sat up straight and slid forward, about to stand. “You don’t think he met the dealer outside, do you? In the stairwell or something? Holy holy.” The three of us followed Jake to the men’s room door and found it locked. I banged on the door and called out Nicky’s name, but he didn’t answer, so I pounded and yelled harder. Jake said the lock was a dead bolt as thick as an index finger.

  Keith went to find the manager. He came back with the guy, in the middle of explaining what we thought had happened. The fellow he brought was a big Viking-type man with a wrinkled brow. He showed no sign of surprise or alarm. Keith told us that the manager was on vacation in Belize and that this guy, Mike, was the assistant manager.

  “You guys work in corporate or something?” he asked. Jake said yeah, and Mike turned his attention back to the locked door. “The only thing I can think of is, there’s a sledgehammer in the back, no idea why, maybe for stuff like this. I’d rather not, but if you think your friend is really gonna ... Damn junkies.” Mike banged on the door and shouted to see if he could get a response. He didn’t. I swallowed hard.

  “Get it,” Jake spat.

  “We might have to hold you liable for the damage, you know.”

  “Just get it!”

  Mike returned after the longest three minutes of my life, slinging the heavy tool with some difficulty. We stood to the left and Mike planted his feet apart, parallel to the right side of the door. Raw manliness glowed in his tight biceps and craggy face as he heaved up the hammer and smashed it against the place where the deadbolt must have been on the other side. It made a terrific clang. A few guys from the bar gathered to watch and give advice. When I turned to the left and right, I saw both Keith and Jake staring in awe at Mike and at the dent he had made in the door.

  It took several more swings to break the lock. Finally it gave, and the door slammed backward and then forward with a bang, settling in a halfopen position. The scene was like something from a haunted house, but real. The bloom of my heart turned brown and crinkly and the petals fell. Nicky sat slumped backward on the toilet with his pants down, lit by the bathroom’s faint bulb and a green neon glow coming from a high window. He’d thrown his head back and a needle dangled from his calf, wagging along with his weak pulse. His calves had small purplish dots all over them. I realized he had never let me see them before, and now I knew why.

  Keith stayed at the door trying to prevent any of the gawkers from following us in. Jake grabbed some paper towels and pressed them down on the needle, slowly tugging it out. I pulled up Nicky’s pants, hardly even thinking about it, just trying to put everything right. Jake examined our brother’s eyes and squeezed his chin, trying to get him to respond. A rapturous grin opened up on Nicky’s face, but it had nothing to do with anything Jake had done. I took his other hand, and Mike stood back admiringly.

  “That guy’s feeling no pain. Okay, let’s get him out of here.”

  “I think we should call an ambulance,” Jake said calmly to Mike.

  “There’s a pay phone downstairs,” Mike told us, in a way that said we had to leave. Keith dashed out to make the call. Jake and I leaned Nicky forward. His limbs bobbed in all directions and he drooled on my shirt. Keeping the door closed, we stayed with him to wait.

  “Did he overdose?” I asked.

  Jake tried to frown a thought out of his head. “It might have been cut with something. A bad something. The alcohol couldn’t have helped.” He growled with pity and fear.

  The ambulance arrived and the EMT workers, a man and a woman, carried Nicky through the bar on the stretcher, cutting a path through the crowd and downstairs like a movie star’s bodyguards. Jake squatted into the ambulance with Nicky and the paramedics, while Keith and I got the hospital’s name. A bystander told us the address, and we followed in a cab.

  When we finally found him outside the emergency room, Jake said it didn’t look good. He thought Nicky had done a combination of drugs that were all bad by themselves-meth, crack cocaine, and something else I hadn’t heard of. I felt stupid for not having realized that during our conversation, and not stopping him when I had the chance. Wait, don’t go to the bathroom, I repeated in my mind, wishing I had said it at the right time. I whispered it out loud to myself. After a couple of hours of failing to stop watching forbidden television shows in the waiting room, the doctor greeted us seriously and said that they’d stabilized our friend. We filed into the ICU, admiring all the technological gadgets that circled the bed and the tubes entering Nicky’s nose and mouth, feeding his unconscious body. I couldn’t contain myself and wept openly.

  “Be strong,” Keith told me, massaging and hitting my shoulder.

  “What for?” Jake muttered.

  I gave the doctors all the information I knew about Nicky, and at 3 a.m. we called a cab to take us back to Resurrection. The attending physician said somebody from the hospital would call if Nicky regained consciousness, or, as he put it, “otherwise.” We had the driver stop far from the building so that nobody would hear us coming back. Sometimes the doors weren’t locked or a window was open on a lower floor. We circled the building, trying everything, and finally yanked open a rusty transom that led into the basement near the clothing storage area. Keith was just small enough to make it through, and with Jake’s keys in hand, he crept into Jake’s room on the first floor to let us in. We managed not to disturb Dwayne’s sleep. After saying goodnight and pledging our loyalty like the Three Musketeers, we went off to our bedrooms. None of us slept well. Nicky least of all-he never woke up.

  SIXTEEN

  I believe in ghosts, of course. But until Nicky died, I figured ghosts were dead folks’ spirits come back looking like somebody under a bedsheet, who leaped out of your cellar and said Woo-woo to scare you. Now I know they’re more like memories that get trapped in your mind and make you think them too much, even though you wouldn’t if you had your druthers. Like the memory of mine where Nicky’s breath inside his oxygen mask made a misty little greenhouse over his face. Or the image of him with his pants down at the only time I wished I hadn’t seen that. Or thinking about how bad it broke me to watch a paramedic pull Nicky’s eyelids open and see those green eyes gone blank.

  I overspent my phone time talking with Annie about it. Or around it. Bill and Gay didn’t scold me; they must have understood my sadness. With Annie, I shared the terrible story of running off and finding Nicky, blamed myself for his death, and explained my frustration that the rules of Resurrection wouldn’t let me show my sympathy because of Nicky’s fallen nature. I told her about the extra emptiness in my room now that I knew he’d never return. Annie listened patiently for the most part, but sometimes she probed.

  “You loved him, didn’t you?” she asked one night.

  “As a-as a brother I did. Yes. I loved him.”

  “Okay.” Annie didn’t say anything for quite a while. Her silence had a disbelieving quality in it, but I didn’t want to point out any extra issues between us if I could pretend that they didn’t exist, so I let her silence keep suspecting. With him dead it didn’t matter.

  For graduation two months later, they filled the church with yellow roses and wreaths. People sneezed on account of the pollen. Fine old ladies wearing fresh corsages jammed the pews, and the brass railings across the altar shone crisp and clean in the tinted sunlight that spilled through the stained glass. An
nie couldn’t make it because it was Independence Day weekend and her restaurant had become very popular. Even surrounded by people who loved me, I felt alone. Alec Braverman came and gave an emotional speech, tossing his curly hair and gazing down at us with pride and sympathy. “The whole world is going to feel different now,” he told us. Doesn’t that always feel more true when a handsome man says it? Bill called each of us up and gave us a diploma and a bear hug.

  Chain of command forbade paying tribute to the fallen, so we couldn’t express our grief about Tom or Nicky in a public way. But during the reception, George patted my back and we talked about how sad and lonely it was to finish the program across from empty shelves and a bed instead of a brother. “We should have moved in together,” he said. “Why didn’t we think of that?”

  As a private thing that day, George wore a cardigan he’d borrowed from Tom and now couldn’t give back. I only had a few of Nicky’s hairs in an envelope, a souvenir too strange even to admit I owned. I could hardly prove he’d existed, let alone that I’d known him. But if you could have hooked a TV camera to my head and broadcast my thoughts, you would have seen mostly Nicky on the screen, without commercial interruptions.

  Though I was happy and proud as I left Memphis, Nicky’s ghost remained in my mind. We never could’ve gotten permission to go to his funeral. “You can’t even be fraternizing with them,” Keith warned me about dead sinners. During every free moment in the office, I tried to find Nicky’s contact information. I wanted to send a note to somebody; I needed to apologize for my part in his downfall. But Gay and Bill had erased Nicky from the files. Once, in a righteous moment, I snuck into Charlie’s office and tried his desk, but he always kept it locked. Searching phone directories didn’t get me any further. So many ]ohnsons lived in Baton Rouge that I couldn’t narrow my search at all.

  Unfortunately, instead of putting the fear of God in me, my memories of Nicky gave my doubts about Resurrection something to stick to. Even if the center could teach some men to manage their unwanted desires, I said to myself, was it worth even one of them dying because he couldn’t change enough?

  Nagging questions like that scratched up my confidence as I hauled my suitcase out of the empty dorm. For the time being, I had changed my behavior, and I believed that sticking to the program would mean freedom from homosexuality. Bill had always insisted on calling us “former homosexuals.” But as I passed through the invisible doorway to real life, that didn’t sit so well with me. Even your garden-variety alcoholic has more horse sense than to say he’s cured. All of us would have to spend the rest of our natural born days in recovery.

  Not long after Gay and I arrived in Atlanta, I dialed the phone number I had for Concerned Relatives’ place in Cabbagetown, but it didn’t work anymore, and the recording didn’t say the new number. I had no idea what might happen if I visited.

  It took some doing, but I convinced Gay that I could go back to my old place to say hello again, apologize, and get a few of my possessions back. She insisted on coming along, though, because she was worried that I couldn’t handle it alone. As we rode the MARTA I stared out at the treetops, making mental notes about how Atlanta had changed. Every time I moved to a new place, I thought to myself, I had tried to become a different, normal person and failed.

  This time would be different. In my wallet I had a stack of crisp business cards, stamped with the logo for Resurrection Ministries-a golden cross in the center of a valentine. The stack made a neat rectangle that stood out on the wallet. I traced the rectangle with my finger, for luck.

  Something didn’t seem right at the house. All the windows had been replaced with sand-colored boards. The grass in the front yard had grown waist-high and gone to seed. A couple of planks of wood covered one corner of the property, and I recognized a plastic bucket overturned in another. A striped mattress with brown water stains covered the steps like somebody had tried to ride it down months ago. When I moved the bucket, I revealed a pale yellow circle of grass with bugs hurrying up and down the blades. I couldn’t help thinking that poetic justice had come down on me. The house had a history separate from me, one I felt I should have taken part in. When I went away, had I become like that house to Annie and Cheryl? An empty, musty old place with boarded-up windows, in need of renovation?

  Our old neighbor from across the street, a white fellow with a big gut, told us the bad news. “See, that was a cult,” he said, even after I tried to correct him. “‘Bout five month ago, this cult done a performance with a fire dancer in the street here or something of that nature, and it got out of hand-this made the papers, y’all ain’t seen? Anyways, they refused to stop the show, even after the police come and tried to subdue them, and one of them cops got his leg broke someway. So the landlord had to throw them out after that.” He nodded with satisfaction, like he’d chased the “cult” away himself. Gay and I were so surprised and confused that we went to the library to check the man’s facts. The broken leg was a fractured skull, but otherwise he’d told the truth. What a disaster! I resolved to find my old housemates as soon as I could get away from Gay.

  At that very moment Annie and Cheryl were driving up the coast, picking my mother up in Savannah for our reunion that night. Every time I imagined the kind of conversation they might be having, I cringed. But otherwise, the day felt like a chance to correct some of the things that had gone wrong before. I could apologize in person for all my bad behavior and start anew in a positive way with everybody I had hurt. Cheryl especially. She had only spoken to me a handful of times over the last year. Her mommy and I always yelled, she told us, and she didn’t want to have to yell, too.

  Gay had worn a pink golf shirt and a blue denim skirt that day. She sat with her legs apart, a hand on each knee. That wasn’t feminine behavior, but I didn’t correct her. As I watched her across the train car, I remember thinking that aside from her large bosom, no matter how she dressed she would still look like a handsome teenage boy, and that thought made me pretty uneasy, because I was supposed to like women as women, not find them attractive for looking like boys. It also might mean that some women were naturally masculine and some men naturally feminine. Thoughts like this always disappeared quickly, however, and for a while I could ignore them.

  We’d gone to the Coca-Cola Museum after leaving the Concerned Relatives’ house. Exhausted by all the traveling, Gay and I could hardly move. We only wanted to sit down and drink cold drinks. Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to go back to the bed-and-breakfast and shower. We had a ton of presents, and we were within walking distance of their hotel, so we didn’t bother going back. I hoped that they’d be so overjoyed to see me for the first time in a long time that they’d overlook how dirty and tired I was.

  Much of the country was experiencing a record-setting heat wave, so the air conditioning gave us a refreshing chill as we passed through the revolving door at the Marriott. A fountain stood in the middle of the lobby, decorated with rocks and plants that looked almost real. I checked under my arms for a bad odor and was pleased not to find one. A shudder went through my body as we rode the elevator, so strong that it knocked my Coca-Cola baseball cap down over my eyes. I belched out of nervousness.

  The hallway was completely silent except for a noise that sounded like wind blowing through an air shaft. Our feet didn’t make any sound against the thick maroon carpet. In an open doorway, a black maid with a sour face shoved a fitted sheet under the corner of a king-size bed. I thought maybe she made the face because I was with a white woman. It would have been funny to explain the whole truth to her.

  “Are you ready, Gary?” Gay asked, squeezing my fingers together.

  “No, ma’am. Not really.”

  “It’ll be okay,” she promised. I didn’t believe her, but I didn’t want to hear the truth either.

  The door was ajar. Inside the room I could hear the voices of my mother, Annie, and Cheryl. The noise of a movie musical came from the television, almost drowning out their voices. I pus
hed on the door with one of my bags of gifts and shouted “Hey everybody!” as I opened it. Annie came over and swung the door the rest of the way, announcing to the others that I had arrived. My mother’s voice screamed “Gary! Gary!” I couldn’t see her yet. Cheryl sat in a chair by the window in a blue dress with frills at the ends of the sleeves, playing with a doll. She didn’t look up when I entered.

  In the small hallway that led to the bedroom, Annie wrapped her arms most of the way around my waist. I kissed the top of her head at the place where her hair parted. I bent down and kissed her on the lips. During the kiss I tried to feel aroused. A small spark of static electricity happened when our lips met, and we laughed, but that was it.

  When the kiss finished, Annie peeked around my left side and saw Gay. “You must be Gay,” she said, shaking hands with her.

  “Yes, but it’s just a name!” she said. I had heard that joke a bunch of times now, and it usually made me chuckle, but this time I didn’t want to remind anybody of the thing that they couldn’t mention. Nobody could say gay. It’s the opposite of John l:l-In the beginning wasn’t the word, and the word wasn’t with God. Mama didn’t know the real reason for my problem, so I didn’t want the conversation to even come close to the topic. I would tell her once I had my impulses under control. “I used to have this problem,” I would say to my mother, and she would be proud that I had conquered it and thankful that I had never told her during the process, so that she hadn’t had to worry. I turned to Gay and widened my eyes to say Don’t talk about that. Annie either didn’t hear Gay’s comment about her name or ignored the joke, and plunged her hands excitedly into the Coca-Cola bags.

  “We come bearing gifts!” I announced. Cheryl stood behind the desk across the room. She held the doll upside down and bent her limbs in all directions. We’d bought Coca-Cola presents for everybody: a snow globe, T-shirts in all sizes, Santa ornaments, calendars that were on clearance, bottle openers shaped like Coke bottles, pencils and pens in a metal Coke box, and a baby seal plush toy.