There Will Be No Miracles Here

by Casey Gerald

  That, in the final analysis, or my best analysis now, is what I realized that night: I had strived to win this world and won my death instead. Perhaps my tears were simply grief and I was not without all hope but tired . . . exhausted after a long journey in the wrong direction. You wonder why the world seems always headed in the wrong direction, too. In part, because young men like Casey Gerald set out to rule it.

  And so I am glad that Casey Gerald died that night and the days thereafter—that he realized he was already dead, had been dead for a long time, had confused the most important words of all: life and death.

  I, whatever he became, am escaped alone to tell thee. I planned to tell my friend, too. I just ran out of time.

  * * *

  —

  I was sitting alone on my couch, in a house that I rented in Texas to escape New York, or the life I had lived there, which we’ll get to, and to tell you this story. It was night, quiet outside and in. The light of one lamp, in the corner, shone on me and the couch and the book I was reading. My phone rang—Riley. I didn’t answer. He sent a message: Give me a call. Very important. I closed the book and called. He told me to sit down. I was already sitting down. He told me that Elijah was gone.

  I closed my eyes, though I’m not sure why or for how long. We sat there—I sat there . . . don’t know what Riley was doing besides not talking—quiet, for what seemed like a long time. I have tried to find a way to tell you how I felt there on the couch, holding my phone. All I know is that I hope you never feel it and I’m sorry if you have. At some point I remembered that I was the elder, so I said something. Not sure what. I know we said I love you for the first time, before we hung up the phone. Think we meant it, though I bet I love you stood for many things we would have said if we had known what to say. I called Trevor, in California, that night. Or maybe the next morning, I really can’t remember which. He was the last person Elijah texted, was Elijah’s best friend, had just seen him, laughed with him, the weekend prior. Some things had not changed since they were seventeen, though so much had changed for both of them, for all of us, since we had met as boys those years ago. One being that we did not try to keep from crying with each other anymore.

  Penny called the next day. I’d never heard her cry, either. She wanted to know what went wrong, what it all meant, what did I think. I thought she should have the answers, not me. I didn’t even have good questions. I did know one thing, or thought I knew it, which I told her: The way we were taught to be men, to be human beings even, was a dead end. I knew this to be true because I had learned it for myself and was trying to write it all down. I had found a witness in the book I was reading when Riley called, a book by José Muñoz, who is also gone but left his words.

  This world is not enough, he wrote. A world that subdues us, mutilates us, makes us operate on straight time, which can only be death time for many, makes us strangers to ourselves so that we can be recognizable to others, acceptable to others, normal to others. A world that pressures us to say at all times, at any cost, It’s only getting better. That is the last message Elijah sent to me, a month before Riley called. I’d wished him happy birthday. He turned twenty-eight that day.

  He had written a year before, an unexpected message, a thank-you note:

  Casey,

  I know that I told you how glad I am that we reconnected last year. But I just want to take a moment to say thank you for everything you are and everything you have done for me . . . I look up to a few people. You are one of them. I know you aren’t perfect, but I really do aspire to be at least half the man you are. Keep doing your thing! If you ever need anything, I don’t have much, but it’s yours.

  Best,

  Elijah

  If I had understood then what I understood by the time Riley called, I would have told him not to do that, or at least made sure he understood what the whole man looked like. How cracked up it was, how okay it was to be cracked up. I am not God so will not say it would have changed a thing. All I know is that Elijah was the bravest boy I ever met, and he deserved a better world, a better path, than the one he was given. The one that I helped give to him. I drove him, drove them all, to be first, be bold, be perfect—be the greatest. What I did not do was drive them to be whole, to be free. Did not teach them that the best revenge was freedom. Did not know it for myself, in time.

  Elijah’s memorial was the following week, in Saint Louis. I was already scheduled to be in Norway, to give some speech. Couldn’t cancel, or didn’t, in part because I remembered what Clarice told me when Papa’s sister died: Aunt Ruby ain’t gonna be at the funeral what you coming all the way here for? I also didn’t want to see my friend like that. The night before the service, I met that beautiful Norwegian, the one I mentioned. Forgot that there was sadness in the world, just thought of mermaids and magic for a little while. Considered seeing him again the day of, but all I seemed able to do was lie in bed and watch Forrest Gump and cry. That seemed to be enough. The boys—the men—didn’t need me anymore. Trevor delivered a wonderful eulogy and sent the text to me after. Riley released an album and dedicated it to Elijah. Quincy called before he went into the operating room to perform a brain surgery. They were now the ones checking on me, figuring out what to do, finding their own ways to say goodbye, to remember.

  It took me some time to find the right words, and even then, they were not mine, but his. Elijah came all the way from the other side, to that diner in my dream, to tell me what to say:

  We did a lot of things that we wouldn’t advise anybody we loved to do.

  I hope you understand.

  PART FOUR

  And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

  Genesis 1:3

  chapter TWENTY-TWO

  If only it were that easy.

  This world is not enough. It is, as far as I know, the only one we’ve got. So. Here we are: up shit’s creek, together. All I have to offer, all this story aims to be, is the paddle that I made—am still making, to tell you the truth. It is hard to build a thing that’s strong enough to get you where you need to go. Hard to find some light in all the dark. To be better than you been. Damn hard. But not impossible. The thing is to get started.

  Once I reached my dead end in Dallas, I decided to leave home, never to return again. Fled to New York City, just as outcasts have always done, and was there until I ran out of money and so did what folks have always done when they can’t stay somewhere any longer: left. Would have been in trouble if I hadn’t had a damn good Get Out of Jail Free card, so to speak, and so fled again, to Harvard, since I had no better place to go. And the nation’s oldest seat of higher learning reminded me so much of the Facilities that I finally, eons after Charlie Brown let me sit inside his spaceship, went out on the road instead of doing something respectable with my education.

  Not that I wandered, mescalined, solitary through America. In fact, three likewise educated friends and I drove town to town, working for free with local citizens, on behalf of the common good, which I hate to say was in bad shape. We travelled many thousand miles across the country—down to New Orleans, which had come through that Great Flood, and Detroit, which I’d heard had drowned in a drip, and out west to Little Big Horn and Montana, where I feared an old tanned cowboy was about to shoot me, until he put two dollars’ worth of quarters in my hand and wished me luck in Vegas, where I was headed once I left his town. So much of what I saw, as I had long suspected, was so real, so compelling, that I truly hope we get to chat about it all one day. For now I will just share the most important thing I learned: You can’t stay on the road forever. Can’t keep fleeing. Turns out that even if you never find the courage to look back, the stuff you fled comes looking after you. This, too, I learned the hard way.

  * * *

  —

  One summer morning, on break from my travels, I sat at a small wooden table in a friend’s New York apartment and, for no apparent reason, beg
an to cry. By now I know you may think I’m a big crybaby, but I really wasn’t up until that morning. From twelve or so on, the older I got the less I cried, except for a few brief and extraordinary occasions, which you know about. So it was a real surprise to just roll out of bed and weep when nothing seemed to be too wrong. But the tears kept on falling and I tucked my head into the pocket of my elbow, resting on the table, and let them fall.

  I’m so alone, I whispered.

  That also made no sense, I thought, since there were so many things and people swarmed around me at the time. Just that week, I’d spoken with half a million or so people, through a television camera at Rockefeller Center; one of the morning news shows wanted to discuss the things I’d seen out on the road. A few weeks after that, some man I’d never met before informed me that he would soon put my picture on the cover of his magazine. Sure enough, he did. And not long after that, a few thousand people crowded into an auditorium, hours early, to see me—or, rather, to see the president, who was coming on stage after me. I don’t want to give the impression that I was famous or anything. I wasn’t. All I’m trying to say is that I was not so alone and that I didn’t have a great idea why I started crying that morning in New York. So I pulled myself together and went on about my day, for many days. Moved into my own cramped, overpriced apartment near my favorite Brooklyn neighborhood, Fort Greene, with its brownstones that I couldn’t afford but which were still so beautiful to stare at and into as I walked underneath the flowered trees that lined the narrow streets.

  My first afternoon there, I passed an old black woman, huddled with a young white girl on the sidewalk. They seemed to know each other. The old black woman said to the young white girl as I walked by: And she didn’t even speak! I said oh no that is not how you treat people in a real neighborhood.

  The young white girl nodded. I smiled, kept on walking, kept on seeing scenes like that around Fort Greene and thought of all the women I had known like that old woman, way back when.

  The children of Fort Greene also made me think of how things used to be, sometimes. They came in many colors, just like the old women, in shades of brown like mine, darker, lighter. And so many of them seemed so happy, joy spilling over—had little skateboards, and wild afros, and some even lugged the same plastic book bags we wore back in the nineties. But what struck me most about so many of these boys and girls was that they did not walk the streets alone. I’d come out of a coffee shop and find myself behind a little boy racing to grab his father’s hand, held out at a perfect height for the boy to clasp, and the two would enter Fort Greene Park, where the man pushed the child on a swing. And, more than once, I saw boys climbing subway steps behind their mothers—and the mother would grab the little boy’s hand and help him hop up the last step or two, and they’d laugh at each other, with each other, and walk on to where they had agreed to go that afternoon. It was an incredible, marvelous thing to see, really. But for some reason, every time I walked behind them, my eyes began to burn, and wetness would gather in the rim of my sunglasses, which I wore to protect myself from UV rays, of course, but also because I never knew when I would see a little boy with his mother or father, walking into Fort Greene Park to swing, hopping up the subway stairs, and feel as if I had seen the saddest thing I ever saw, which made no sense, since I had seen much sadder things.

  More and more it seemed my tears were not connected to my brain, as if an edict had been passed, an inviolable law, demanding that all the tears inside of all the people be released. At least inside of me. And just like that, there was a little puddle around my feet or on my pillow when I woke up from that same old dream in the middle of the night, which also came more nights than before.

  I hid no big secrets any longer. I waged no wars with God; we were working things out. I’d lost my appetite for revenge, my lust for glory—though I backslid every now and then. Yet here I was, still hunted in my sleep and, more and more, my waking hours. What fresh dead end was this?

  And if that was not bad enough, the world seemed at a dead end, too. For example, one weeklong stretch of summer went as follows:

  On a Tuesday night in July, two cops in Baton Rouge pinned a black man to the ground outside a convenience store and shot him six times, to death. The following day, a cop in Minneapolis shot a black man in the side—also to death—as the man reached for his driver’s license. Two days later, a black man stood on the roof of a building in downtown Dallas and shot five cops with a sniper rifle while they guarded a protest, organized to lament the events in Baton Rouge and Minneapolis. The sniper then barricaded himself in a parking garage, informed interrogators that he’d planted bombs throughout downtown, and was, shortly after the bomb search began, blown up himself, by a police robot. My sister was trapped in one of those buildings that night. A friend—or lover; it’s complicated—was thrown in jail down in Louisiana for marching against it all. This was, in kind, a typical week: some cornucopia of national catastrophe and private crisis.

  Things did not improve.

  Britain quit Europe, which might be finished once again. The North Pole was well on its way to melting into a giant swimming pool. I met a beautiful Palestinian on my pilgrimage to Jerusalem; as soon as I left, his friends were killed in a dustup near the Western Wall; he fled to live in exile: this is not a parable. The Klan came back in full force, membership quite young, all or nearly cheering for the 45th president, whom the FBI feared was in cahoots with the Russians. So did I. California almost burned beyond the ground.

  See the world. Savor it. Soon, what will it be? That is a question for the prophet.

  * * *

  —

  My question at the time was simply: What is wrong with me? Ever wonder that? If so, my final admonition is this: Stop. Drop whatever’s in your hand. Leave your basket in the aisle. Retrace your steps out the door. Find the crack. Try to find its source, understand its reason, excuse or not. Try. That is all I knew to do.

  With little thought and far less warning, I left New York. Disappeared, you could say. I rented a little house in Austin, where I had no kin and few acquaintances. Wanted to be all by myself for a while, to hear my own voice(s) and, maybe, hear the voice of God. See if I could patch my cracks up, at least find out how they came to be. Everything that I have told you in this story is the result of my investigation. I was putting it all on paper, making my little paddle. Then I got that call from Riley. Then Elijah came to see me in my dream. Now he helps me make the paddle, since I did not get to him in time.

  * * *

  —

  I have a radio. It picks up only two stations: Life and Death. I turn the death off, now that I know the sound. The diddy bop of death. I sit in silence if I have to.

  * * *

  —

  I have a photograph. The family stands together in a lush green field with leaves at their feet and trees behind them. Daddy. Mama. Sister-girl. There’s the little boy again. His arms were airplane wings. That was a twinkle in his eyes. God has confirmed that he was born that way: a small brown moon with joy for craters. I look at the photograph each night before I go to bed.

  * * *

  —

  I wake past midnight and tiptoe into the kitchen of the world. Reach for the switch and brace myself for what’s to come: a million little roaches of disaster, scurrying across the newspaper countertops, taunting, tempting me to fetch a shoe, douse them with a poison mist. I turn off the lights. I lie back down. I rest. Did you know that roaches were around before the dinosaurs? There’s a message.

  * * *

  —

  I have not given up.

  * * *

  —

  I set out to find that little boy, somewhere in the rubble. I had no search-and-rescue animals. No flashlight. All I had were words. These words became the bread-crumb trail that led me back to him. He was there! Found him sitting all alone on a rock in the woods with a rain-soaked sack t
ied to a stick. Wounded. Not dead. C’mon, boy. He took my hand, or I took his, whatever. We walked back home. We made home up from scratch. Decided not to buy a Christmas tree this year. He teaches me what joy is. I teach him—no, we learn together—how to live. All that time spent learning how to die. How to run. Now I’m right back where I started.

  Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that I received another message shortly after Riley’s call.

  Is your ass in Austin? I’m in Carson the next two days.

  It was River.

  Five years had passed since I’d last seen him, sometime around my dead end, before I left for New York City. Spring, it might have been. I’m not sure. I do know that I drove to Carson and that we spent a day or two together, and of that day or two I remember only enough to warn you: never spend the night with someone who hates you with just cause. It was agreed, without an uttered word, that we would never see each other again. So much for that. Time heals no wounds, but you do start missing people after a while. Besides, only God has the wild card of destruction in His deck. The rest of us are stuck with the same old cards. And so, of course, I went to pick him up.

  Made the hour-long drive north and on through those same dark streets, the same long strips of dimmed shopping centers, same small shadowed churches, the 7-Eleven, the old high school, the park, the same few hills—to the same boy. Now a man, I guess, as was I, though I still felt like a boy most days.