The Inner City

by Karen Heuler

  Jonah sighed. “You’re missing the point.”

  Joey smacked him on the back. “The point is, you’re good and I’m not. I get it. You spend a lot of time at Church, I’m watchin’ TV. You sing hymns, I like Rap. Rap, Rapture, I wonder if there’s a connection.” He snapped his fingers, both hands, and shook his head.

  Jonah tried to pity him, because he knew he should pity him, because his parents would tell him to pity Joey for his sinful fate. But Jonah liked Joey too much to visualize his damnation. Instead Jonah saw—in full Panavision—Joey sauntering around in left-behind clothes and a good car, grinning like a lottery winner. Having fun. Always having fun.

  Joey whistled—not a tune, but a series of random notes; he was always doing that. He pulled out notes like a man jingling change. The world would certainly be different after this Rapture, he thought. He liked Jonah and certainly would miss him, but it would be interesting to see who disappeared and who would be left behind with him. It would be fun to see them disappear, actually.

  “Huh,” he said. “How do you do it? I mean, does everyone float up all at once or is it alphabetical or by age? I bet it’ll be on TV. So how does it work?”

  Jonah shrugged. “We all float up together. Or we all just disappear while the rest of you blink. There’s an argument about it.”

  Joey bit his lower lip thoughtfully. “We don’t all blink at the same time.”

  “But you could,” Jonah said.

  Joey admitted they could. “Of course I could get a camera and watch you. Or you know,” he got excited, “I could put a camera on you so I could see you lookin’ down at me as you floated away. Because you know when it’s gonna happen, right?”

  “A week from today,” Jonah said.

  “And the time?”

  “Sunset-ish. Seven PM.”

  “Good,” Joey nodded. “I don’t want to miss prime time. I like my TV.”

  Jonah sat with his family in the yard. They had all showered and put on their best clothes. His little sister, Gina, clutched her favourite doll. Joey had not shown up, and Jonah was relieved. And the weather was still good. They had gone through storms all week, dry storms with high winds. Another front had been predicted, but hadn’t shown up. They felt blessed.

  His father led them in prayers and then they sang together, and then his father read to them from Thessalonians. The birds put up a mighty ruckus, and when his family sang it seemed to Jonah that the birds joined in, shouting the joy of God in their bird way.

  Jonah kind of liked it. It did seem like the attention of the universe was focused on him. On them. A breeze came through, like an angel’s wings, and he could feel the presence of God. His parents and his church were always talking about the presence of God and up till then he hadn’t been quite sure about it, though he learned to drop his voice to a whisper and smile with encouragement whenever it was discussed.

  But now he felt it, like a splendid sunset hitting his chest. And it was a splendid sunset, right on cue, with blues and pinks and purples. Clouds chugged along the horizon, picking up colours and getting bigger. Gathering. As he had already noticed, the birds sang like they were convinced of something.

  Finally they all held hands on the last “Amen” and lowered their heads and waited, their eyes closed. God, he knew, would breathe in, and they would rise on His breath.

  The first few moments were calm and steady, but nothing happened. Time went on, the birds got still, the wind picked up, and Jonah peeked out through his lids. His mother’s face was lifted up to the sky, her lips faintly parted and Jonah could tell she was breathing through her mouth. Gina was wide-eyed, looking around in the evening. Her hand had already abandoned Jonah’s hand, but she still held on to her father, who had a frown line appearing now just above his brow. A frown or a shadow—it was rapidly getting dark. And then there was a loud crack—this was it!—and the heavens opened and a rain came down like a booby trap. They stood up slowly and went inside.

  The next morning Jonah’s parents were very quiet. They never listened to the radio or the TV for news in the morning, just said their prayers and ate their breakfast. That morning was dreary.

  “Maybe we got the calculations wrong,” his father said. “They were very delicate.” He looked better than his wife, who seemed to be huddling even as she prepared breakfast. The rapt look she’d had was gone, replaced by uncertainty.

  “The numbers were checked,” she said softly. “Over and over. We’ve been waiting for years.”

  Jonah’s parents, of course, disliked Joey but he hadn’t actually been forbidden to see him. Instead, a sentence would pop up in their talk every so often. “I hear that Joey is failing in math. Does he need a tutor?” or “See if Joey can make it to Bible study this week. If he’s a friend, save his soul.”

  Joey’s soul seemed pretty sturdy, and he went to Bible study only once, where he smiled gamely and asked confusing questions. He said, for instance, that the bible wasn’t meant to be literal. He said he’d been told that by an ex-nun and a Reformed rabbi. The rabbi had impressed him. “He’s reformed,” he repeated. “Gone straight.”

  “I’m not sure your friend is the right friend to have,” Jonah’s father said.

  “And he may be bad for you; he may accept sinful situations and make them seem harmless to you,” his mother added. “Out of ignorance. Because he doesn’t know any better.”

  “He doesn’t have God,” his father confirmed. “And when you don’t have God you’re condemned to Hell. You know that.”

  The fact that Joey was going to Hell made it harder than ever for Jonah to give him up. The rules his parents laid out were clear: he should be polite to Joey, but he should ignore him whenever possible. But Joey was always interesting; Jonah felt his own life was boring, and predetermined. He was at that age when he wanted to be surprised, to be alerted, and maybe even to stun someone in return. He was thinking about the last conversation they’d had, when the Rapture was imminent and Joey was going over all the things he might pick up cheap.

  “Now look at that,” he’d said, nudging with his chin as he looked out the school bus. “That would be good to have, a dog like that. If you guys take off, let me know where the dogs are so I can pick one out.”

  Jonah looked and saw a big dog sitting in front of its dog house.

  “I’m thinkin’ about a career with dogs,” Joey continued. “Maybe search-and-rescue, or trainin’ them. I like it when they do what they’re told, you know? Even when they’re not exactly told—when you click or make a noise or raise your arm and they jump.”

  “Like an airplane,” Jonah said. “Remote control.”

  Joey nodded, once. “And what about you? You still goin’ into space?”

  It sounded sarcastic, at first, since they were going to ascend soon, but Jonah had once said he wanted to be an astronaut. That was before the date had been announced. He always loved to look at the sky. It was mixed up with God, of course; he wanted to see with God’s eye: the earth compact below, the stars around him like hair. He didn’t know if Joey experienced this same surge of goodness, of wanting to bless and be blessed coming from all his skin, all the cavities of his body. Joey talked about sex all the time, of course, as if that was similar for him. Jonah had been excused from Sex-Ed classes on religious grounds and he got all his information from Joey now. Most often it was crude and boasting, but Joey included masturbation in his talk, and it was the only time Jonah heard about it or sex without the smack of shame.

  “That girl,” Joey breathed, as one of the other buses drew beside them, and a fully-formed girl in a pullover raised her eyebrows and stared. “That girl.”

  But Jonah didn’t want to hear. “About the dogs,” he said. “Why don’t you get a dog?”

  “I have a dog already,” Joey said. “But it’s old and small. Doesn’t do anythin’. I can get another dog when I get a job, but if I get a job while I’m in school I won’t have time for a new dog. One of my dad’s tricks.”

/>   The bus with that girl pulled ahead of them as they neared school and for a while Joey pretended they were in pursuit, chasing her.

  “There are girls in heaven,” Jonah said.

  Joey shrugged. “But no sex. Never heard of any screwin’ up there.” He snorted. “Heaven. Right.”

  Jonah’s face lit up. “Souls meet,” he said. “They meet and touch. It’s like telepathy, almost, how you don’t need the body—”

  “The body’s the point,” Joey said in disgust.

  “No, no, no,” Jonah reassured him. “There’s love. Love is more than the body, isn’t it? You love your mother, you love your father—”

  “Not that much. Not that way.”

  “All right, you love a girl. You love her a whole lot, but she won’t sleep with you. Do you stop loving her?”

  “Yes,” Joey said strongly. He twitched all over, happy with himself.

  Jonah was trying to think of a way to reach his friend. He knew that everything Joey had just said was a sin, just as everything Joey did was a sin, and everything Joey thought, probably, was a sin. But he believed he could save Joey’s soul, and he thought it was worth saving.

  “How do you think about God so much?” Joey asked. “I mean, where do you go with it? It’s like thinkin’ of the colour red. You get it in your mind and then that’s it.”

  “No. When I go on thinking about it, I see the sky and it expands and the stars blink and I keep watching. I think of God and the whole world expands and I feel ready to burst.”

  Joey laughed meanly. “And you call that God, that burstin’ feeling?”

  Jonah’s face felt hot. “I know what you mean and that’s not it. I know what you’re talking about and it’s completely different.”

  “Oh sure, sure,” Joey said. “I must have a lot of God in me, ’cause I’m burstin’ all the time. With holy love,” he said, pleased with himself. “Burstin’ with holy love.”

  Jonah felt a sharp loneliness at the way Joey was mocking him. He believed there was a strong bond between them, but it was always slipping away, and then coming back, and then slipping away.

  The morning after Rapture, Joey wasn’t on the school bus, which was filled with kids whispering and crying. Jonah found a seat by himself, avoiding everyone. He suspected they all knew the Rapture hadn’t come, that they were whispering about him.

  But the whispering and crying were all over the schoolyard. Finally, he just stood and looked around. No one was pointing at him or laughing at him. It all began to register, finally: something was wrong.

  He passed two sobbing girls, four stiff-shouldered boys. One of the very youngest students stood all by himself, wailing, his arms stiffly at his side.

  He saw Corinne, who sat next to him in homeroom.

  “Didn’t anyone tell you?” she asked, blinking. “That storm last night. There was a tornado. It got the bus over on that hilly road to Bightsville. They were coming back from a game. Didn’t you notice that storm? It was terrible.”

  “It was just some rain,” Jonah said, arguing. “I know because I was outside when it happened.” Then he was struck, both by the look of contempt in Corinne’s eyes and by his own thoughts. He was beginning to worry. “What happened?”

  “A lot of people died—that’s what happened.” It was almost as if she hated him, as if she thought he had something to do with it.

  “Who died?” he whispered.

  She began to name off all the boys and girls. He knew some of them. He was relieved every time he heard a name he didn’t recognize; every time the name wasn’t his friend Joey.

  “Joey,” she finally said. She glared at him.

  “What?” he said, jumping back slightly. “Joey?”

  She nodded, and wiped her eyes. “The whole bus,” she said. “Every single one of them. All gone.”

  Jonah walked away from her. His head had gotten a little dull; he kept thinking that sometimes Joey hitched a ride home and he didn’t usually do after-school stuff. Sure, once he showed up at band practice as a goof, but all he’d done was cause trouble. And he’d only gone to one or two games before. Why would he go when he knew the Rapture was coming?

  Maybe Corinne had it wrong. She was a smart kid, but she only knew what she’d heard.

  He lifted up his head, then, and scanned the crowds. It was the same kids in the same groups everywhere. They held to their regular spots.

  Tommy came up to him and said, “Bummer, no? Joey?” And he shook his head and put his hands in his pockets and went off.

  The teachers were gesturing for everyone to come in; a few of them were even going around to the groups, putting their hands on arbitrary shoulders, leading them. Jonah got caught in front of a group and had to go forward, into school. They were led into the assembly.

  The buzz of words got quieter. Kids filed in and sat down, their eyes scanning the room.

  The principal started telling them how sorry he was, and that there were grief counsellors to help all of them deal with this tragedy. And he listed the names of all the dead, no—the “known dead.” There were two bodies not yet identified, and of course, there were two students unaccounted for. Results were awaited.

  He included Joey when he read off the names of the dead. But Joey was capable of bad jokes, of bad taste, of not knowing when to respect other people’s feelings. Joey was capable of fudging this somehow.

  However: “accounted for and identified.” Could Joey really pull that off?

  He stood in line for the grief counsellors. “I don’t think Joey’s really dead,” he said.

  The counsellor smiled sadly, then consulted a list. “He really is,” she said. “What you’re feeling is very natural, it’s called denial. The first thing you do is insist that the facts are wrong. Because you can’t, at first, accept it. It’s a terrible thing, it really is, but it happened.”

  Jonah sat there, miserable and polite. Joey was dead.

  There was a half-day at school. He went home and sat in the kitchen. So, apparently his parents hadn’t heard or they would be there, waiting for him. Wouldn’t they?

  He sat at the kitchen table, his head feeling very heavy, and he thought about it. He could find no way to put all this together. He wondered, shamefully, if Joey had left him anything. He was always going on about how Jonah should turn his stuff over because of the Rapture.

  I bet he didn’t see this coming, Jonah thought. I bet he was really surprised. It was supposed to be me.

  When his mother got home, Jonah said, “Joey ascended.”

  “No,” she said. “I understand what you’re feeling. It’s a shock. We were all prepared for ourselves, and it’s a disappointment, but one thing has nothing to do with the other thing.”

  “It happened at sunset.”

  “Coincidence.”

  “You always say there is no coincidence with the Lord.”

  “I think you should pray harder. As soon as your father comes home, we’ll pray. You’ll feel better. We’ll pray for Joey’s soul.” She looked away a little at that.

  “You think he’s burning in Hell!” Jonah said, suddenly understanding that look.

  His mother sighed. “Of course he is,” she said gently. “You know that too.”

  His father was depressed. “The numbers all added up to this,” he said. “And we invited the Lord into our hearts and lived for Him. Does it make sense to you that He would abandon us like that?”

  His father had been born with the name Robert, but he took the name Paul when he converted, because he was struck suddenly, mid-life, mid-path, by the Lord. He’d been on a walk in the park and stumbled on a church picnic, and there, standing as if waiting for him, in a ray of sunlight, was Ann Mary. “Come along now,” she’d said gently, turning, “he’s about to speak.” And this was how he entered the Church of Rising Saints, and how he was persuaded that the Rapture’s date was revealed in the Bible, if you read carefully and did your math. From that point on, his life had felt luminous and popula
ted. The Rapture had been far enough in the future not to seem frightening then, and over the years he had learned to accept it hungrily—all of them, together, glorious.

  Ann Mary worked for the Church for a very low wage, doing clerical matters and filing various forms. Paul, however, worked in the world, delivering packages for a shipping company. He was friendly to his coworkers and had, once only, and a long time ago, tried to give out pamphlets from his Church. Now he tried to smile, be gentle, never foul-mouthed, be polite—he tried to live as an emblem of his religion and not mix. Not be polluted. Over the years, he had invited a co-worker or two to his home, but it had always been disappointing. They had come in eagerly, and left even more eagerly. They did not want to discuss God; no one in that world wanted to discuss God.

  And God was the background sound in Paul’s life: the resonance, the resource, the high-pitched whine.

  Each day he went out to their world, each night he came back to his own. In love with God, with Church, with Ann Mary. His wife believed her children went fortified out to the heathens, flowing in the safety of their belief. She had been out there—knew that it was possible to love the endearments of the damned; it was hard not to wish they could be saved, but she had learned that for all their humour and ease, they could line up against you.

  So Jonah kept a sort of cautious silence about his life, and was solitary at school, until Joey sought him out. Joey looked poor and unkempt; he had a nervous energy and a compulsion to pursue his own curiosity. He heard, once, that Jonah belonged to a cult, and he attached himself to Jonah like a dog.

  “We are not a cult,” Jonah’s father said stiffly. “Cults do not praise the Lord, they praise the leader of the cult. They’re heresies.” He paused, took a breath, and said, “Everywhere you go, people believe in someone or something—God. Everyone has a version of God. But they’re not all true. They represent how much people can or will understand. In a way, it’s like music. Some people like classical, some folk, some rock. Music speaks to people, yet there are higher and lower forms of music. So why do some people love the low forms of music? Because it’s all they can understand. It’s how far they’ve gone with their abilities—with their souls.”