Praying Drunk

by Kyle Minor

  I walked out of that Stonewall storefront that afternoon holding the warm flesh hand of a thing that moved and talked and looked for the life of me just like Danny did at six years old, and it was nearly unbearable, at first, to touch him or hear him say, “Now we’re going for ice cream, Daddy?” and to remember the bargain we had made with Danny the day we took him to get him scanned. You be good through this, we’d told him, we’ll take you to get whatever kind of ice cream you want.

  So I said, “Sure, buddy bear,” and I took him up the road to the Baskin Robbins, and he ordered what Danny always ordered, which was Rocky Road with green and only green M&M’s sprinkled over top, and we got a high table for two, and I sat and watched him chew exactly the way he used to chew, and lick the spoon exactly the way he used to lick the spoon. He said, “Can we split a Coke, Dad?” and I said sure, and went up to the counter and ordered a large Coke, and when I forgot to get an extra straw, I regretted it the way I used to regret it, because he chewed the straw down to where you could hardly get any Coke out of it.

  After that he wanted to go walk the old stone wall like we always did when we came to Lexington, so I took him down there and parked the car and got him out and hoisted him up on the wall, and held his hand to steady him as he walked on top of it, and he said, “Tell me about the slaves, Daddy,” so I did what I used to do and told him about how all the black people in Kentucky used to belong to the white people, and how this very wall he was walking on had been made by their hands, one stone at a time, and the mortar mixed with probably some of their sweat and maybe some of their blood, too, still in it, and how even with all that Kentucky fought for the Union and could well have been the difference in that war. While I was saying it, I was remembering how I used to believe things like that, and the feelings that used to rise up in my chest when I said them, feelings of pride and certainty, and warm feelings toward my people I had come from. These were stories my own dad and granddad used to tell me and which I was now passing along to my own son, and this little Danny, walking along that wall, holding my hand, said the same thing the other little Danny had said in a moment a whole lot like this one but which couldn’t have been, if you think about it, any more different if it was happening on the other side of the world. He said, “It wasn’t right, was it, for people to keep other people to do their work for them? How did anybody ever think it was right?”

  And I said the same thing I said then, which was, “People don’t always do what’s right, son, but you and me get the privilege of making our own choices, and we have to make good choices. That’s what makes a person good, is the choices you make.”

  Right then is when we went off the script. Could be that something was wrong with his making, or could be that I wasn’t leading him right, but right at that moment, he took a wrong step and fell. He didn’t fall off the wall altogether, but he caught his shoe on a stone that was sticking up at a bad angle, and when he fell, he caught his arm on another stone, and it cut deep into his skin, and when he tried to stand up, he pulled away and didn’t seem aware that his skin was caught on that rock. I guess they don’t build those things in such a way that they feel pain the same way you and me do, because as he stood up, the skin of his arm began to pull away from what was underneath, which wasn’t bone or sinew, but cold lightweight metal, what I now know they call the endoskeleton, and what began to drain from him warm wasn’t his own blood, but somebody else’s, and the reason it was in there wasn’t to keep him alive, but just to keep his skin warm and pink, just to make him look and feel like someone alive.

  “Danny,” I said. He must have heard the alarm in my voice, and I could tell it scared him. He looked down and saw his metal arm, the skin hanging off it, and the blood pouring out in a way that wasn’t natural, and then he gave me a look that sank my soul, and I realized what I should have realized before I signed what I signed, which was that I had got them to make a boy out of something that wasn’t a boy. All that was in his head was all that was in Danny’s head a long time ago, back when Danny was himself someone different than who he became later, and it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know what he was, and the sight of it was more than he could handle.

  His lip began, then, to tremble, in the way Danny’s did when he needed comforting, and I lifted him down off that stone wall and took him in my arms and held him and comforted him, and then, in the car, I stretched the skin back to where it had been, and took Penny’s old emergency button-sewing kit out of the glove compartment and took needle and thread to it and got him to where none of the metal was showing. I didn’t take him to Penny’s like I had planned.

  He was real quiet all the way home. He just stared straight ahead and didn’t look at his arm and didn’t look at me. Near Winchester I asked him if he wanted to hear some music, and he said all right, but we couldn’t find anything good on the radio. “How about the football game?” I said, and he said all right again, and we found the Tennessee Titans and the Dallas Cowboys, and I made a show of cheering for the Titans the way we always had, but when he said, “How come all their names are different?” I didn’t have a good answer, and after that I asked if he wouldn’t mind just a little quiet, and he said he wouldn’t mind, and I leaned back his seat and said, “Why don’t you just close your eyes and rest awhile? It’s been a long day and I bet you’re tired.”

  He did. He closed his eyes then, and after some time had passed and I thought he was asleep, I stroked his hair with my free hand and made some kind of mothering sounds.

  It was dark when we got to the house. I parked the car by the bedroom window, then went around to his side and picked him up like I was going to carry him sleeping to bed. I held him there in the dark for a little while and thought about that, carrying him up to bed, laying him there, laying his head on the pillow, pulling the covers up around his shoulders, tucking him in. It would have been the easiest thing to do, and it was the thing I wanted to do, but then I got to thinking about Penny, and sooner or later, I knew, she would have to be brought in on this, and even though I thought I had done it for her, I could see now that I had really done it for me, like maybe if I showed up with this little Danny she would come back home and the three of us could have another go of it.

  But already this little Danny was wearing out. I could feel it in his skin. He wasn’t warm like he was when I had picked him up, I guess because the blood had run out of him on the stone wall. He was breathing, but he was cold, and a little too heavy compared to what I remembered. There wasn’t any future for him, either. I got to thinking about how if I put him in school, everyone would get bigger than him fast, and it would get worse every year, the distance between who he was and who his friends were becoming.

  He was stirring a little, so I put his head on my shoulder, the way I used to do, and patted his back until his breathing told me he was asleep again. Then I went around to the front of the house and reached up to the porch and took down my axe from the wood pile and went off into the woods, down the path I had mowed with my riding mower a few weeks back, and which was already starting to come up enough that I had to watch my step.

  I kept walking, him on my shoulder, axe in my free hand, until I reached the clearing. Then, careful not to wake him, I unbuttoned my jacket and got it out from under him and took it off and laid it on the ground. Then I laid him down on it and made sure he was still sleeping. Then I lifted up the axe and aimed it for the joint where his head met his neck and brought it down. In the split second right before blade struck skin, I saw his eyes open, and they were wide, and what I saw in them was not fear but instead some kind of wonder, and then, fast as it had come, it was gone, and all I could tell myself, over and over, was It’s not Danny. It’s not Danny.

  GLOSSOLALIA

  “ARE YOU INTERESTED IN ME BECAUSE I’m a girl or because I love Jesus?”

  “I am interested in you because I like you.”

  “But if I didn’t love Jesus, would you still be interested in me?”

  “I
would like to think that I would be interested in you no matter what.”

  “But if I didn’t love Jesus, I don’t think I would be the same person.”

  “If you didn’t love Jesus, I think in some ways you would be the same person.”

  “But I wouldn’t see the world the same way, I wouldn’t read the same things, I wouldn’t make the same choices, I wouldn’t be around the same people.”

  “But I think you would still like a lot of the same things. You would still be a ski instructor in the winter. You would still spend the summer here on the beach. You would still run. You would still bodysurf. You would still be physically very beautiful. You still would be a person who cares about other people, and you still, probably, would have taught me to bodyboard.”

  “But I used to be a person who didn’t love Jesus. I used to make different choices. Like when I was a freshman in college, there was this older guy, and he used to come into my room and sleep in my bed and he knew how to do things with his hands and his mouth. He knew how to make me feel things.”

  “You didn’t have sex with him even though you didn’t yet love Jesus.”

  “I didn’t have sex with him because I had an idea of Jesus, but I didn’t yet really know Jesus. I thought I did, but I didn’t.”

  “But you prayed to Jesus, didn’t you?”

  “I did pray to Jesus, but not in tongues.”

  “When did you start to pray in tongues?”

  “When I was filled up with the Holy Spirit.”

  “Is that when you stopped messing around with this guy?”

  “No. It was later. There were other guys. In Madrid, this one guy took me to an R.E.M. concert.”

  “Did it make you feel dirty to mess around with him?”

  “No. It made me feel good. But I still felt empty inside.”

  “How did you learn how to pray in tongues?”

  “I prayed to be filled up with the Holy Spirit, and then I was given the gift.”

  “Can you do it on command?”

  “I can do it anytime, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Can I hear you do it?”

  “Would you like to pray with me?”

  “Will you do it if I pray with you?”

  “When I pray I do it. It comes naturally.”

  “How do you know what it is you are saying if you are speaking a language you don’t know?”

  “I don’t know what I am saying. It is my spirit that knows what I am saying. My spirit is communing directly with God’s spirit. I can’t explain it, but I can feel it, like this energy pulsing through me.”

  “If I held your hand, could I feel the energy, too?”

  “I feel like you are being glib.”

  “I am not being glib. I just feel like this is something I don’t understand but I really do want to understand. I want to be a person who is open-minded to new experiences.”

  “Take my hand. Here. Take my other hand. Let’s pray.”

  •

  “What did you think just now, when I was speaking in tongues?”

  “I thought a lot of the sounds were repeated and there were a lot of consonant clusters. I heard maybe some sounds that sounded like German and some sounds that sounded like Hebrew or Arabic maybe. There were also a lot of sounds that you don’t make when you speak in English, like rolling your R’s and flattening out your O sounds.”

  “That’s true. I have noticed those things, too.”

  “Do you ever try to think about recording what you say when you say it? Like, maybe you could do some code-breaking and make a dictionary.”

  “Again, I feel like maybe you are being glib.”

  “Hear me out. I’m being serious. The idea is you are speaking a language that people don’t speak on earth, except people who speak the language of angels. So consequently, if you follow the logic, it’s a real language. So wouldn’t it have the things a real language has, like grammar and syntax and vocabulary? And if that’s so, couldn’t you study it just like you could study any other language?”

  “That’s movie stuff. That’s like something starring Patricia Arquette.”

  “Why not, though? There’s people who do this for a living. They go over to Papua New Guinea or wherever, and they spend time around a language, and then they reconstruct it, even though when they first get there they don’t know the first thing about it.”

  “That’s missing the whole point.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you knew the language, then the purity of the communication would be lost. You’d start crafting all the words instead of the spirit that indwells in you crafting the words.”

  “But—and here I’m not being glib, I’m just trying to understand—don’t you want to know what it is you are speaking to Jesus or the angels or whatever?”

  “You don’t pray to angels.”

  “But it’s an angel language, right?”

  “The idea is that you’re not in control. You’re giving yourself over to it.”

  “Is that why you jerk your body to the left when you pray in tongues?”

  “That’s a manifestation.”

  “Why do you do it?”

  “I don’t do it. It comes over me when I give myself over to the Spirit.”

  “Does it happen to everyone who speaks in tongues?”

  “Some people fall down like they are dead.”

  “That’s slain in the Spirit.”

  “Right. Some people fall into fits of laughter. Some people bark like dogs, but not too many people. I don’t want to judge, but I think sometimes when that happens a lot it can be for show. But I don’t know.”

  “That’s something that worries me. It’s a little bit frightening, don’t you think, like on TV, when a lot of people are doing it all around, and there’s this ungodly cacophony?”

  “That’s the fear of the Lord you’re feeling.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “How can you be sure of anything? You know. I know. I know that I know that I know.”

  “Here this stuff is at odds with logic, maybe, I think.”

  “I think that’s a wrong way to think about it, but tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “I took this philosophy class. Dr. Willard Reed. He was talking about the distinction between belief and knowledge. He said knowledge is problematic. You can’t really know stuff that isn’t somehow verifiable. Like you didn’t see it with your own eyes or experience it yourself or there hasn’t been some kind of consensus among the people who study the thing. And even then there’s problems. How do you know you aren’t fooling yourself? Or how do you know the consensus might not be wrong. Like the consensus used to be that the earth was flat. And on top of that, how do you know that the universe didn’t just begin two seconds ago. After a while, everything starts to be belief.”

  “I don’t guess it matters much which is which, then, if it’s all so slippery.”

  “I don’t guess it does.”

  “But what kind of way is that to live? Walking around not being sure of anything. Everything tentative. No place for boldness. No place for meaning. Wouldn’t that just throw you into some kind of paralytic feedback loop or something? Wouldn’t you just be staring at your navel forever?”

  “Not necessarily, but I don’t know. You just described a lot of the way I think a lot of the time.”

  “That’s why you have to let go control. That’s what praying in the Spirit is. You’re letting go that control and giving yourself over to your creator. It’s an act of faith in the unseen. Although, I have to tell you, there are things I have seen.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Visions. Gold dust.”

  “Gold dust?”

  “There have been meetings where the Spirit of God has come down and the manifestation was gold dust that began to appear on everyone’s shoulders.”

  “Manifestations, like the jerking to the left.”

  “I’m not going to say anymore if you
’re going to mock everything.”

  “Honestly, I’m not mocking. I really want to know. Tell me about the visions.”

  “Once I was praying in the Spirit, and I had a vision of a golden vessel.”

  “Like a ship?”

  “Like a vase or a container. It was on a cloth of purple silk. There was an angel there, and he was holding out his hands.”

  “What did the vision mean?”

  “For a long time I didn’t know what the vision meant. But then my friend who is a prophetess—quietly, quietly a prophetess, like, literally, hardly anybody knows. She said it was a message about being a vessel for the Spirit, and about a royal calling, but I had to give myself to it.”

  “That’s why you write the magazine articles?”

  “That’s why I’m writing the books. That’s why I’m traveling around so much. To speak into people’s hearts and lives.”

  “But you like it, too. You’re good at it. You don’t want to work at a desk job.”

  “That’s true. I don’t want to be chained to a desk. I was made this way for a reason.”

  “Any other visions?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Another time. Later.”

  “All right. It’s a lot to risk, right? Telling me all these things?”

  “It’s nothing to risk. I already have given myself over to all of it.”

  “I can wait. I want to get to know you.”

  “Would you hold me now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t come over here inside my blanket. You stay inside your blanket and I’ll stay inside my blanket, and you can hold me that way, with the separate blankets.”

  •

  “Do you like it here?”

  “I’m uncomfortable here.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t like the cold, and I don’t like all the soldiers in their uniforms, and I don’t like all the military songs. I think I might be a pacifist.”

  “But these are the men and women who give their lives to keep us free.”

  “I like watching the football game, and I don’t mind cheering for Air Force, but I am uncomfortable with the whole martial atmosphere. It seems to me to have a lot to do with death and killing.”