Smoker says, “Amazing, but…”
Mom says, “Your future, it’s already written itself. For you to get to where you want to go, baby, you need to trust in the Lord and do his bidding. Past few weeks, at the church, we’ve been working it out. These ladies have been there right along with me, sleeves rolled up and getting in the trenches. As it’s written, Proverbs 10:4, ‘He becometh poor that dealeth with a slack hand; but the hand of the diligent maketh rich.’ You’re the wealth, Ade.”
“Mom, I’m super tired, just want—”
“Aren’t you interested in what we found out?”
“Found out?”
Chubby fake-claps her hands. Smoker says, “Something wonderful.”
I look to Mom. She grins, says, “We weren’t looking as deep as we needed to. We weren’t seeing all the connections. You know, watching you put all those cards, all the string, up around your room, that project you and your friend were working on, it gave me an idea. Take a look at this.”
Mom turns the projector on and nods for Chubby to dim the lights.
THREE
And she starts a slide show.
Pictures of me up first. Me when I was ten with freckles and my hair like straw. I’m running. Wearing a train conductor’s hat. And there’s me at the zoo riding the bull sculptures. And there’s me in a swimming pool. And then me only a few years ago with a black eye I don’t remember having. Next slide is a painting of Jesus. He with a crowd of followers. He in his robes, looking the ancient Israelite but all the people around Him dressed in modern clothes. A chef, a businessman, a surgeon, a woman with a child on her hip and a wooden spoon in her hand.
Mom says, “All the signs were there from the get-go.”
Next slide is a time line. It starts now and goes out for years. Right near the middle, maybe when I’m forty, there’s a big red cross and under it, written in Comic Sans, is the word “Rapture.” The next slide, it’s a Photoshopped cloud in the shape of a hand. A big exclamation point next to it.
Smoker says, “We found it. You saw the hand of God in a cloud. Pointing east to Jerusalem. The sign everyone’s been waiting for.”
Mom says, “There all along.”
I start getting up from the table. I tell the women, my mom, that I’m just really tired and I appreciate them sharing this. I tell them that I’d love to spend a little more time on it tomorrow. I say, “Nice presentation. Must have taken some time.”
Chubby stands and raises her hands, “It’s not over, Ade.”
Mom says, “Please, Ade. Five minutes.”
I sit back down with a groan. The slides continue. More pictures of me intermixed with passages Mom’s typed in from the Revelation Book. There are charts and even diagrams. My future laid out in black and white, with a terrible font. I’m really not paying much attention but nod when they look at me. Smile when it seems like I should.
Everything they’ve got, the whole presentation, is based on all the stuff I made up. All the stuff I pretended I saw in my visions. See, my mom’s organized it all chronologically and, looking it over, she thinks there’s a pattern. This slide show, it basically says the Rapture’s due any minute now.
All of this from my lies.
From the cloud I said looked like a hand. From the dude I saw pulled on the breach who was drunk, the dude I added the Jesus just off the cross pose to. The mourning dove I added to the tree in the college vision. And older stuff like the chrysanthemum seen in a mall store and the eyes of a child that were pale fire.
She goes all the way back, years and years of my fibs all lined up and trotted out like they’re real signs, like this is the road map to Heaven. What’s odd about it though, and what I seem to have forgotten in all my making stuff up, is that the further out she goes, way out to when I’m middle-aged, the visions get darker.
Where she’s got it marked as the Rapture, there are the words “cloudy” and “darkening” and “nightmare.” And what’s uncanny about it is I can only think of the visions I’ve had showing me a future that’s indistinct, murky. I think back to the visions that seemed threatening, the ones that made me frightened. The storm at the beach. I see what Janice showed me and I honest to God shiver right there.
Smoker notices, she rubs my shoulder, says, “It’ll all be okay.”
And suddenly I’m actually paying attention to my mom’s slide show and I’m waiting with bated breath for her to show me what comes next, what happens after the Rapture. When she flicks on the slide of the mental institution I almost fall out of my chair.
“What the hell is that?” I ask, half shouting.
My mom looks at me worried. She says, “It’s from the vision you had after you crashed your car on Ninth Avenue. It was only this past summer. July, I think.”
“I don’t remember,” I stutter. “What did I say?”
Mom looks to Chubby. Chubby looks to Mom. Chubby shrugs.
Flipping through the Revelation Book, Mom says, “It was somewhere right over here, just by … Right, okay, here it is. You said that you saw yourself living in this place. That you were crippled or something but that you weren’t too worried about it because somehow, down deep, really, you knew it was only an illusion. You said there was an angel there, an angel told you.”
“What angel?”
Reading right out of the Revelation Book, Mom says, “A man in a mask told you.” Then mom looks up and grins, closes the Revelation Book and folds her hands over it. “The Lord certainly works in such funny ways.”
There it is, this whole thing already known. The past right here.
If anything, realizing I’ve seen it before and forgotten, it makes me sick to my stomach. It makes me want to run screaming out of the house and smash my head against something hard. I want the Buzz so badly. So incredibly badly.
When the presentation is over and Chubby puts the lights back on, I lean back in my chair and struggle over whether to burst their bubbles. The way I’m feeling, I think I have to.
Smoker asks what I think. If I’m convinced.
Chubby says, “This is why you can’t stop. Jesus will provide you with another love. This girl, she could be sent here for another reason. To distract you. Satan’s certainly been known to do such things.”
I wait for a moment of silence. A few breaths in and out.
And then I say, “Mom, I make up most of the stuff that I see. All those little details that you guys have based this whole presentation on, I made all those up. I didn’t see that dude in the Christ pose. His arms weren’t out. He was squished. And the chrysanthemums? Never once saw one. The sun. The clouds. All of that stuff I made up so you’d be happy with me. So you’d make me dinner. Take care of me. Talk my teachers down.”
Smoker looks to Chubby.
Chubby looks to Mom and Mom just shakes her head.
“You know, you do look tired. You’ve had a long week. Why don’t you go ahead and get some sleep. I’m sorry we bothered you with this tonight … it—”
“Made up, Mom,” I say, standing. “All of it to make you happy. To give you the world you really truly wanted. And for a long time, well, for the whole time, I was fine with it too. I was happy to do it. But not anymore, Mom. My head is clear now. The only future we need to care about, to really think about, is tomorrow. Maybe next week. I’m not going to throw away my life just to make sure I get into the next one.”
Chubby screws her face up.
Smoker nervously picks at the back of her neck.
Mom asks, “Well, what made you so worried about the slide of the mental hospital? You were visited by an angel, you told me so yourself. Please don’t try and backpedal away from it, Ade. I’m here to help you.”
I feel sorry for my mother, but I say, “Lies, Mom. I’m a good actor.”
Mom is breathing quickly. Nostrils flaring. Mom’s in sympathy mode. Only it’s not the kind of sympathy you associate for someone who’s sick. For someone with something terminal or wasting. This, this is the kind of sympathy reserved for people who work really long hours. People who sacrifice themselves for their beliefs. Priests. Kamikaze pilots. The way she looks at me when she’s with it is the way you look at an icon. At a saint. Her eyes are deeper than they’ve got any right to be. Crying without tears. She says, “After all we’ve done for you? You say these things in front of my friends? The only people who really care for you, Ade? The people who—”
But I don’t hear the rest because I’m in my room with the door locked.
And then the slamming begins. It’s Mom’s fists hammering my door. Hammering it so hard that I can hear the wood cracking, I can see the hinges shaking loose. There’re plumes of dust hovering near the lamp by my bed. Mom is shouting all sorts of things. Mostly she’s painting a picture for me of what Hell looks like and how unfortunate it would be for me, for someone so gifted as me, for someone who’ll always be that brown-eyed kid on J.C.’s lap, to wind up stoking the flames with the rest of the sinners. Mom says this, but then, after a pause, she backs down. She tells me that she didn’t really mean it. She tells me that she loves me and appreciates me. She says, her voice muffled by the door and by her ravaged from screaming throat, “All can be forgiven. Let’s talk.”
I don’t open the door.
I lie back on my bed with my arms folded up under my head and I try and sort everything out in my mind. I try and pull the threads together. Try and figure out how there can suddenly be two futures. How I can see myself healthy and happy in one and crippled and tormented in the other. I close my eyes tight and beg my dad to visit. I want to see his young self, his masked self, standing in the corner of my room. I want him to explain it all to me again. Which way is which? Does killing Jimi lead to the happy life? Does not killing him? My head hurts. I massage my eyes, pressing down hard on the giving spheres of them.
After a long time of silence, I hear Mom in her room sobbing. I can hear her praying and I know she’s on her knees with her eyes closed and her head bowed.
I’m sure she’s speaking in tongues.
I’m sure she’s biting the insides of her cheeks until they’re bruised and swollen.
The two of us, we’re both confused in different ways.
The two of us, we’re both hypnotized by something neither of us understands.
FOUR
When the sun is highlighting the horizon, I climb out my window and drive over to Vauxhall’s place.
Just like in all the teen movies, I throw pebbles at her window in the backyard and duck down into a bush when the light in her mother’s room comes on. I’m throwing rocks for fifteen minutes before I toss a real big one that I worry is going to shatter the window, but only makes a super-loud thud. Vauxhall, in a tank top and Umbros, comes to the window and looks out at me and shakes her head. She opens up and says, “You’re a very bad boy. It’s way too early for breakfast.”
“I know,” I say. “I can’t sleep.”
Learning out her window, her cleavage as pale as the moon, she says, “Watch TV like a normal insomniac or something.”
“I don’t like TV.”
“Play on the computer. Download a movie.”
“I want to see you.”
Vauxhall says, “Naughty.”
She invites me in and her room smells like sandalwood and vanilla. She curls up on her bed on a mound of beaded and tasseled pillows and I sit on the floor, legs crossed, just staring at her. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, she blows me a kiss and, head on her hands, says, “You were like a superstar tonight.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I felt really alive.”
“So, superstar, you ever dream about flying?”
“I used to,” I say. “But now it’s mostly swimming.”
Vauxhall thinks about that for a beat and then reaches into her nightstand and pulls out her video camera. I can hear it whir to life and then a green light comes on and suddenly the room is bright with neon lime.
I say, “I was wondering when that would reappear.”
Vaux’s like, “Tell me about the swimming dreams.”
The camera hums. It is soothing.
I say, “It’s swim practice. I just feel alive in the water. Must be because they keep it at like eighty-two degrees at Celebrity’s and it’s like swimming in a womb or something. These dreams, they’re mostly about me swimming in this shallow sea, like the Great Barrier Reef. You know, really super-clear blue water. Lots of fish too. Colorful fish. Some so big that when they swim beneath me it’s like the whole bottom of the sea is moving.”
As I talk my eyes adjust to the light from the camera. And soon I can see Vauxhall’s legs and chest and her feet and the top of her head, a beautiful green ghost.
Vaux asks, “In the dream, are you alone?”
“Yeah. Almost always. But in a very peaceful way.”
She asks, “Are you naked?”
“I don’t know.”
She says, “In all the dream books it talks about swimming meaning sex. Particularly if it’s in warm water. Supposed to be like your subconscious yearnings. Your desires. Do you feel like that means anything?”
“No.”
The voice behind the green light asks, “Why?”
“I don’t buy all that dream interpretation bullshit. Dreams are just what happens when I turn my mind off and let the screen saver play. Mine, it’s one of those tropical screen savers. Helps that I’m relaxed.”