There Will Be No Miracles Here

by Casey Gerald

  It worked only one time. And yet I still tried it every now and then, even once with my eyes closed. And I still stared out the window when I passed through the living room, still listened for the front door in the night, still waited for the local news to inform me of a woman’s body that’d been found in the Trinity River. None of these were reliable ways to foretell when or whether she’d be back, but that didn’t stop me. And if insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, then I guess you could say I went insane, but I did not feel insane at all in those days, though I did sometimes feel a gnawing pain in my stomach, not like I wanted to vomit but a bit like I have felt, maybe you have felt, when you rush to catch the train and make it just in time based on the schedule and you stand there at the platform’s edge, leaning over, peering down into the dark and empty tunnel where the train was meant to be, five, now twenty minutes ago, and arrival times have come and keep on going and you wonder where’s the train and you worry that you’ll lose your job or you know that you will miss your big appointment or you wonder if your mother’s dead. And you just don’t know.

  All I know is that she came back home one day or night, and was off to a Facility some day or night soon after. At some point in that stay, the phone rang at Granny’s house.

  Casey? Granny called out, gently, from her bedroom. Didn’t sound mad or nothing.

  I popped my head inside her doorway.

  Well now that was your mama’s doctor called. Said she checked herself out the hospital today.

  She on her way to the house?

  Chile, I don’t know. I figure she’ll be down here after while.

  I figured, too. She even called once. Said she’d be home soon. So to my regiment of windows and front doors and news bulletins and strangers on the sides of roads I added phone calls—the phone rings, that little ding of hope goes off, hello? Bill collector. Next time. She didn’t call again.

  And now I figure this: If ever your mother asks you to choose between her death and disappearance, have her die. Always. Though not immediately, of course.

  Death has a certain elegance to it. A date. A time. A body. A clean hemline, so to speak. Death is, more and more by the day it seems, very expensive. Whatever the cost, pay it.

  A disappearance, on the contrary, is a messy, sordid enterprise. It is hard even to pin down when, exactly, someone disappears. For the cops, it’s after a certain number of days, or proof of foul play, or once they decide your people are worth tracking. For friends and family, it depends on when each person hears the news, whether they trust the messenger, whether they give a damn, and so on. The hardest point to determine is when the Disappeared would say they disappeared, since they never disappear to themselves. All you know for sure is that they’re not where they used to be, with you. And since there are so many missing people who wanted nothing more than to vanish, it is unclear whether you, the Left Behind, are suffering a hardship or committing an injustice when you canvas the neighborhood and staple posters to light poles and pray or ask for prayer. What kind of just God, after all, would help you hunt somebody down? And in the event that you stop searching—stop waiting, close the curtains in the living room, switch the station from the news, sleep soundly through the night, see many women on the sides of roads and speed up, don’t look back—it is unclear whether you have set the Disappeared free or simply given up.

  And all this ambivalence, the muddle that a missing person leaves behind, might explain why I’ve said for all these years that my mother disappeared when I was twelve, in ’99. Even told a president. I was just about to tell you the same thing, but happened to be rummaging through my few personal effects that survived those days, and stumbled across another artifact, near that photograph I told you about—if you want to call a middle school science folder an artifact. Nothing special, just an assignment from January 2000, definitions—epicenter, fault, seismic waves. Back then schools demanded parental involvement, so near the top of this document Granny had signed her name. Made sense: Mama had disappeared, Granny lent her imprimatur thereafter.

  Now, I have never been able to leave well enough alone, so kept looking through those files. Worksheets. Pop quizzes. Outlines. A drawing:

  And there it was, at the bottom of that drawing: an ornate signature in blue ink. My mother’s. At the top of the page was a date, also in blue ink: 17 August 2000. Maybe her mind was so gone in ’99 that she wrote the wrong year. I kept looking. There it was again—August 23, a quiz on lab safety. And again—August 31, a bell ringer re: the respiratory system. October 18: a test on circulation. October 26, in the margins, notes on cells and chromosomes. Then, 2 November 2000, Granny’s signature returns.

  This made no sense.

  I wondered, for reasons you will come to understand, whether I had drawn those signatures myself. I hoped like hell I had. Was so desperate for some clarity, for vindication, that I asked my sister, without really asking her, when her mother disappeared. Were your parents at your hs graduation? I texted. I knew that Tashia graduated May 2000, that everyone who could have been there should have been, to see that little girl with those shiny plump bronze cheeks walk across the stage. To see what she’d grown up to be: valedictorian, champion of lost animals and little brothers alike, provider of her own home training, defender of wayward parents. She’d even given a quote to the News in ’99, she was so loyal: I love him with all my heart. I’m going to be behind him 100 percent as long as he’s doing right.

  Ummmm not daddy . . . i can’t even remember if Mama was . . .

  I was so thrown off by my sister’s reply that I let her know why I’d asked. Even with the stakes raised, all she could remember was that I broke the disappearance news to her sometime before Thanksgiving 2000. The signatures were authentic, sure enough.

  I consider the fact that my mother was around on 31 December 1999, on my thirteenth birthday, for my sister’s graduation, on August 17 and again on October 26—around for a whole year after I, for years, swore she had disappeared. Consider the fact that I, who was meant to remember, cannot remember any of it, that my sister cannot remember any of it. And I ask myself—ask you—what if all the terror of the world, not all but some of the Big Terror, is actually lost forever? Too much to remember, too loud a terror to listen to again. What if to remember nothing is to remember something: to remember that you, at some point, had to forget? Did I, in my rummaging, discover a scandal, or a tragedy, or a choice? A choice to remember the end on my own terms—or better yet, to remember my own private beginning? Is that not how our world was ordered? One day, a man laid out a calendar and marked year 1, anno Domini. His purpose (like I knew that man) was not to mark the day the Hittites died, or the Parthenon was abandoned, or any other tragedy that befell the BC peoples. He chose year 1, pulled it out of his ass, so to speak, so that we would remember, always remember, a certain New Thing. And he didn’t even do that right, turns out. His choice still stands. Why can’t mine? Or yours? Why can’t we rename the years, mark some for sorrows, others for fresh starts, for redemption? Perhaps that’s what I did. Or perhaps my mind went bad for a while. Or perhaps I simply made it up, lied for all those years.

  All I know is that she disappeared and that 1999 still strikes me as a good year for the end of things, so I’ll let her stay gone in my head for all those months she was still, in some form, around. And I’ll also tell you of one final departure that for sure took place in the year 2000, but since it was a very 1999 kind of thing, we’ll leave it with the other disasters of the last millennium.

  I’d known, in the abstract, that my sister was going to college after graduation—she’d been accepted to Xavier University in New Orleans, where she planned to learn how to be a neonatologist, whatever that was. This sounded well and right to me. But then she packed two suitcases. Then people started showing up to Granny’s house the night of her send-off.

  I don’t remember the meal and I hardly
remember who attended aside from my mother’s sisters and Shon’s husband, who would be driving Tashia the nine hours to Louisiana. I remember the party ending, the seven or so people still there. We linked hands in a circle around Tashia. Somebody prayed. Folks took turns giving her a hug goodbye. They let me go last.

  I reached up to wrap my arms around her, but before I could say bye I couldn’t say anything. My throat closed up and somebody just kept grabbing at my chest, or that’s what it felt like, and I couldn’t make any words come out. I could only scream. Tashia kept patting me—Casey, don’t cry, I’ll be back—and Shon or somebody said Y’all let’s leave ’em alone and they left and I wanted to stop crying this was so embarrassing, but my back kept crunching up and I could have made her scoliosis even worse that’s how hard I squeezed her. You ever want something not to happen in equal proportion to your certainty that it is going to? Don’t leave, I kept saying under my breath, into her stomach. She pulled away, smiled, walked to the car. I stood at the front door and watched the taillights ease up the hill, out of view. Gone.

  PART TWO

  And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.

  The Apocalypse of John

  Revelation 21:1

  chapter FIVE

  Poor John . . . Alone, exiled to the isle of Patmos, must have had some wild shit going on in his life, too, as he wrote down his apocalypse—new heaven, new earth, the works. I understand, brother. I do. Compared to that my dreams were pretty tame: all I needed was a new home, a need that was not revealed to me by God but by my cousins, who began to joke, around the time my mother disappeared and my sister left for college, that I was homeless. And as with many things I laughed at in those days without actually being amused, I worried they were right. I was not without a place to leave my clothes, have a meal, lay my head—a place to live, if only in the most basic sense of the word. But I could not tell them where my home was at that time and even now you’ll have to let me look beyond the brick and mortar to trace some outline of my home in all the places I have been. The first of which appeared on the first day of the first year of the new millennium, when D’Angelo released the second single from his second album, Voodoo: “Untitled (How Does It Feel?).” On the same television that I watched Peter Jennings bring in the year 2000, I watched D’Angelo’s video for this song. A lot. So much that after the first few (dozen) times I had it memorized, and watched it crouched before the screen in the dark with the sound off, so that everyone in the house thought I was asleep.

  Have you seen it?

  The opening frame is empty but full of blackness. You know something is coming. You can sense the camera is moving. As it moves, the magic meaty top of a golden brown ear comes into view. It’s D’Angelo’s.

  From the ear your eyes follow the back of his head, the tight brown flesh between narrow rows of braided hair. You scan the perfect rows around to his left ear, past the jagged sideburns, across the glowing cheekbone and finally come to rest on his eyes. You are so close to his eyes you cannot see the forehead above or the nose below. He cannot see you because he is not looking.

  Open your eyes, D’Angelo. The eyes flutter once, twice—does he even want to do it? He looks at you.

  His eyes are calm like he’s been watching since the dawn of man and already knew what you were doing when he wasn’t looking. You want to die, it’s that perfect.

  The stare is too much and he knows it. The camera rushes down the bridge of his nose and rests on cool gleaming lips. You are a child but those are not the lips of children, they are man lips god lips spread lazily over a tiny gap in small marble teeth.

  Pan out from the lips that you’ve fallen into, see the goatee that runs to a trace of beard lining the beatific jaw and around to those ears and into the blackness behind him.

  The strong neck offering a path to shoulders that shine in the studio light of God and—wow—a real man chest that is flanked by one tattooed wing on his left arm. The chest is bare except for a simple gold link chain that hangs down in the valley carved in the middle of his heart. At the end of the chain is a gold Jesus hanging on the cross.

  The feet on the cross point down his sternum to a crooked belly button that has come into view inside the ample muscles between the strong veiny arms that swing at his sides, above the place you can’t believe the camera is panning back to show. He is naked.

  You can’t hear him but you know what he is asking at this moment, in the song.

  How does it feel

  You don’t know.

  He takes a glance (nervous?) to his right—the first time he is not watching you or down below or God behind his eyelids. We are not alone and we do not know who’s there. But D’Angelo doesn’t stop. You feel that if you are caught, he will make it okay.

  The shot goes back to his face, up close. His head drops. His eyes close. His hand grabs at his chest, which now fills the entire screen—the most perfect chest you’ve seen, adorned with the tiny golden replica of the most perfect sacrifice.

  He is sweating now. The drops run down to the navel but don’t enter it, they just keep running down. The camera does, too. How far? How far down?

  Oh wow. You are watching a stomach drenched in sweat and writhing all by itself. It doesn’t matter that you can’t hear a word D’Angelo is saying. The words don’t matter. You haven’t breathed in two and a half minutes, as far as you know.

  He starts to turn. You think it might be the camera, moving to show a different angle. But he asked you how it feels, not what you think, and you feel like he’s turning away—is it a threat? You worry you may never see him again, though he has the back of four men’s backs and that wing across his left arm, so you know that you could mount him and fly away. Where are you going, D’Angelo?

  With his back turned and his arms partly raised to show his clenched fists, he lifts his head, which now is bathed in the light. You watch him cry out, again and again. Then he’s turned back around to face you, but he’s not really here. It looks as if he’s close to tears. His stomach is pumping like he can’t catch his breath. He’s staring down—at what?—and lifts his right hand to put it behind his head. He starts to smirk. He’s smiling. Something is happening down there. Inside of him. He raises his left hand but doesn’t put it behind his head—instead he puts a fist to his temple like his mind is about to ooze out of his ear.

  What. Is. Happening?

  The camera draws you quickly to his face. He throws his head back and opens his mouth wide enough to let the scream flow, wide enough that you can see the dark pink line running down the back of his throat. An exorcism? You see the blackness inside his nostrils. You see the muscles in his neck. You see his eyes, clamped shut. He is not there. He has swerved out of the frame.

  This is what your life is supposed to be. This feeling. He looks at you again now and you know it is a different look than the first one he gave you. Different than any look anyone has ever given you. D’Angelo is not fucking around this is not a game this is not lust this is an earnest plea and a question that only you can answer: How does it feel?

  That’s what he’s asking. Crying. How does it feeeeel? And his face is full of pain like he needs to truly know how it feels or else his mission cannot be complete. He punches the air and sweat flies across his face and runs down his brow.

  He doesn’t take his eyes off you again until he opens his mouth and looks far into the darkness above him and the darkness sends down light. When he looks at you again you wonder if he’s angry but you know he’s not ashamed. You are not ashamed anymore, either.

  You have wanted so badly to escape. Once a month, sometimes more, you’ve prayed the prayer of salvation, hoping to feel the Holy Ghost and to know that even your sin, worse than all the others, can be forgiven. You keep praying because you haven’t felt it yet and fear you never will. But now you feel it. You feel it in the way he shak
es his head, how his body rocks and his knees buckle, the sincerity in his eyes when he looks at you and mouths what no one else has said to you before: I want to take you away from here. You feel naked and beautiful and right.

  For thirty seconds more, D’Angelo swerves in and out of the frame, his fists punch the air, his head rocks back and his mouth bursts open. And then it’s over. He looks at you and lets his mouth rest. The screen blacks out. But you have seen and felt it all. Found a piece of what you needed. At least I had.

  You see, I have been on this earth for thirty years and have not met a single faggot, starting with myself, who survived without finding another place, real or not, to call home. If you know what I mean, I hope you’ve found it. Will do what I can to help. If you don’t know, if that word sounds harsh, it should.

  There was a boy I met around this time, D, who everybody knew either because they went to school with him, or because he was one of the top track stars in the city, or simply because he was loud and Oak Cliff was small. Even as a teenager, everybody also seemed to know, or insinuate, or violently allege, that D was sweet.

  On New Years Eve 2010, D was stabbed to death in his apartment in Houston. He was twenty-four. His roommate found the body the next afternoon, and the news reached us all within a week. A few days later, Luke, BK, and I went to a sports bar to watch the NFL playoffs. During one of the commercial breaks I brought up D’s death.

  Say man, remember D? Did you hear he got killed?

  Nah, all I know is he was a faggot, one of them responded.

  The commercial break ended, Luke went to get a beer, and I realized that a decade earlier, hardly anyone I knew would have stopped short of a full, perhaps silent, endorsement of this death.