High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel (7 page)

Time slowed.

A cool and clear muffle of silence in the hall, and I could feel a sort of velvety veil about to be lifted. I looked at my notes. They had dropped to the floor. Were my parents angry? Was I in trouble? I saw them as if through thick glass, or deep water, and I couldn’t hear or touch anything outside my head at all. I was standing at the edge of a high cliff, and I looked at my notes on the floor … Was I shouting just now? I think I was shouting. And then the audience exploded with applause. I heard everything, I saw everything, and I felt every texture in the hall for a long moment. I was every last body all at once, and I drank in the applause like it was a large cup of RC Cola. Mom and Dad stood from their seats, and they were clapping. All four thousand people, and they loved me—they loved me! I’d even dropped my notes on the floor, and they loved me. I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to say next, and so I did what just came naturally: I recited scripture. And then I went off script completely, swept away in a rush of something new, some new
me;
maybe God did grant me sight, a revelation. A glimpse of what waits for this world.

He showed me a horse.

And I gave them what they wanted, what we all wanted: I gave them a date. I gave them what no one else would give them—or would they? I’ve often wondered, since then, if some other sermon had to be changed that day because of me and my big mouth. I gave them the day and the hour of the End. It would be twenty years more before I was wrong.

But at that moment I was the Josiah, king of the four thousand Christians, God’s mouthpiece. It was like filling up with every bit of light and heat that had ever passed through my body. I was Blake’s Great Revelation Angel, glorious and towering. Of course, I didn’t think it at the time, only later on, like when I first saw that illustration in a coffee-table art book, but my God, that’s just how I felt. I figured everything would be different. School would be different. And I figured if I bowed they would just keep on clapping. So with a small stiff arm at my waist, I bowed. The audience answered again! Another swell of applause! Which did what but just make me hungrier. I can still see that kid from way out here, through all this stuff we think of as time, the small and early spirit-hungry version of me—stepping out from behind the microphone and, boy, just look at him bow. No, he curtseys. Like it’s his grand opening night, like it’s his coronation. He curtseys, and the audience can’t help themselves. Some people actually lose themselves in laughter, in appreciation, an ovation, and maybe some in their enthusiasm actually tarnish the dignity of the whole affair because let’s not forget this is supposed to be worship, a serious business, God’s business, but then again, who are we kidding: the kid is good. Curtseying, for crying out loud! Now raising a hand like No, thank
you
. Little me waves to the back, like some visiting ambassador. Remembering the scene sent me reeling, feeling every little thing all at once.

I thought of looking out there at my mother’s face, the face of my lovely and still alive mother. Hands folded at her mouth, eyes teary with pride. My father nodding his head, My boy … The elder brothers from the side of the stage whispering: “Hey, psst, hey, time to leave the stage…”

I looked at Mom, and I took in a very deep breath. I concentrated on that small thing that lives way inside (I have tried this since and failed miserably): the tiny, invisible, indestructible point—but sometimes it fills up a room and touches its head to the ceiling; how big a horse would I need, if a heavenly horse came riding and rearing from back in the aisles? Come the final day, come Armageddon, the blood will flow and fill the streets, high as God’s holy horses, the elder brothers waving me over …

Wait a second now:
Whose
blood?

I literally asked myself this question. This I remember more clearly than anything because it was the question that pulled me down to earth. I’d recited this scripture how many times without thinking? How many things are like this in life?
Whose blood?
My good mother would one day slip and swim through whose wet blood? The applause started dying away …

And then my mother nudged with her chin, a throw of her chin, like Go on, sweetie, go ahead. And Dad looking like, Hey, it’s gotta end sometime …

I looked around the theater, one more time.

My mother would wade through a river of whose dead blood exactly? Red blood? Real blood? I looked up at the sky, at the cosmic ceiling, at the butter-yellow moon, and I don’t know how I’d missed it! Even from way down there, onstage, I could plainly see it. Across the moon was a jagged line like a lightning bolt, a crack in the painted plaster probably not even wide enough for a finger. But if that moon were real, the crack would have been a canyon twenty miles wide. The ceiling was just a ceiling.

Does this make any kind of sense? Pictures of planets don’t make planets, Josiah! The sky was painted prettily, yes. We were in a theater! In Queens! The trash bags were piled out front by the sidewalk, and the soda trucks were driving by in the street, and there was a whole world of warm-blooded people out there who had not an inkling of our blood-spilling talk inside. I actually played the phrase in my head several times in the following days: “The ceiling is really a ceiling.”

I sat there in the back of Abdullah’s cab, and thought of my father and how many different fathers we all have, of how many I’d had. All of them Gill, but different. There was the father I had when I was a kid, and I wanted nothing more than for him to be present with me in the world, for him to stop acting like I had something to give him, and to momentarily put aside his worship for a game of checkers. There was the father who argued with my mother, who soon insisted that church worship was no longer enough, and he wanted more worship at home. There was the father who eventually refused church altogether—but never God—when Mom got sick; and if already Dad was in a boat all his own—and he very much was—Mom’s getting sick made him pull up the gangplank. There was the father who frightened me, who prayed for hours, on his knees, facing a wall, who I believe at least one time deliberately hurt himself; I was young and so I can’t recall when for sure, but I remember finding him on his knees, in the garage, and slamming his thighs with a large yellow phone book, again, and again, and again; Mom rushed in, took me away, and shut the door behind us. There was my deliberate insomniac of a father, the man who paced, back and forth, in the kitchen, in the garage, on the sidewalk, who stayed up for days sometimes, refusing sleep, showing increasing signs of what I see now was temporary dementia. Mom would tell me not to worry and just leave him be. That my father was praying. One night, I was maybe nine or probably ten, it was three or four in the morning, I heard the early insects, and someone talking in our backyard. I went downstairs and looked out the kitchen window. I saw him pacing, talking to himself. I slowly opened the door, very slowly. I heard him repeating scripture like a mantra: “And he dreamed, and beheld, a ladder from the Earth, and the top of it reached up to Heaven, and the angels were climbing up and down. And he dreamed, and beheld, a ladder from Earth, and…” This made me afraid, and feel lost, unprotected. Except then I realized, as my eyes got used to the darkness, that my mother was sitting there in front of me, right at my feet, on the top porch step. She didn’t turn around. She said, “Go to bed, love.”

Most of that behavior, the more extreme kind, stopped the famous summer of my “vision,” or whatever you want to call what happened. It seemed the very thing he’d been waiting for. And of course there was the father who tossed me aside when I left New York. Last of all, the father who lost my mother. I’d wondered how he’d go on. But he did. I wondered who he was now, without Mom. Was he different? How different? Without Sarah, I felt lost inside my own body, and she was alive and well.

I decided my favorite version of Dad was a young Gill Laudermilk, looking like an older Luke Skywalker, back when he and I assembled my first sermons in the garage, and I practiced speaking in the full-length mirror by his study desk, when he let me drive his station wagon, a brand-new Ford Country Squire, fire-engine red, in a nearby supermarket parking lot. My favorite mother was the great protector who once boxed the ears of a sixteen-year-old neighborhood bully because he had tripped me. A wide gash had opened in my bottom lip when my chin hit the sidewalk. Mom once said, “Never listen to what others say about your father, because your father is a man of God.” She followed his every revelatory whim, every iteration. My favorite father drove up our street in his Country Squire like he was in a homecoming parade; he honked his horn and grinned from behind the windshield, saying, My son’s gonna learn how to drive! Wheels crunching gravel in the driveway, he shouted: This old world, my boy, it’s sinking! So if now’s not the time to splurge, tell me when? Tell me when!… The porch of our house was a covered porch, yellow with white wooden columns, and you could see the newly built Sikh temple behind our yard, and around the corner its pear-shaped rising roof, and my mother watching the workers disassemble the scaffolding, saying, What happened to the Irish and Italians, good churchgoers, this neighborhood is so brown … From the porch, we watched lightning storms while sitting on the sofa my father had found in a trash pile ten blocks away. It smelled of basement wet and hot asphalt, and sat in front of the living room window, opposite the sofa on the window’s other side, inside, where we watched old movies and ate peanuts from orange plastic cups. Mom used to say,
Star Wars
makes me so nauseous. I mean it’s exciting, Josiah, it is, but the world can never get that way because we won’t last that long. Armageddon’s right around the corner … Sausages simmering in the Crock-Pot.… It’s not easy! she’d say. But not much longer before our Heavenly Father comes home. And it’s so, so sad that no one in the neighborhood will ever see Heaven, because the Hindus don’t know Jesus. These statues of Ganesh, circus elephants sitting pretty with flowers in their hands, this is God? Abomination!

And there was something about the way the Bible told them, telling me, Sweetie, the monsters are real. A demon with six hungry heads and the Wild Beast will come from the ocean, and the Whore will ride on its slick, wet back, and that Last Day will be like no other since the floodwaters covered this earth, wiping away every evildoer. And the falling stars will blow like bombs, and the poison mushroom clouds will bloom—

Goddamn! Dad shouts, I’m sorry for my language, but my God, isn’t it high time! Because this generation will not pass away before the Day of the Coming of the Lord! So why not go ahead and get us a brand-new car? Shiny and red like Golgotha’s blood-soaked mud! You heard it spoken by the brothers at church: You were right, Josiah! It’s coming! This is war, so stretch your legs! And I bet everything we have in this life that this world will crack in half, and stink like the dead egg it is! I will
not
be caught unawares with my family running after buses packed with Catholics. I will not be dependent on Muslims, or Moonies, or anyone but our provider who does not have a car, who does not need a car, but rides on the holiest of horses. And we will follow him to Heaven, to the sun if he takes us, this is not your mother’s world, and this is not your world, so take this place and shove it down Gehenna’s hungry throat. And, my son, when you are a full-grown man, and it’s your time to steer, you will sit in the driver’s seat and take us home in the fashion of real holy worship. And we will lift up ourselves and finally grow wings because this here round nest is done, say it with me, son, “
All the former things are passed away, all the former things
…”

I once saw my father’s hands on my mother’s neck, just once, on her shoulders. He was pushing her against the dining room wall. I was astonished. I thought they were hugging, but then they weren’t hugging at all. When was this? Sometimes there were finger-thin bruises on her arms, but by the time I was a teenager the bruises had gone away. When I was about thirteen, I saw Dad limp and pale, as if he’d fainted, on the garage concrete floor. My mother was crying out, to me, him, to the ceiling: Your father’s only sleeping, you wake up, honey, so what if they took the car.…

I looked away from the window, and toward Abdullah. A cigarette would have been nice. But the pack was in my bag, the bag was in the trunk, and I’d been quitting for years.

“To Richmond Hill, yes?”

I said, “Let me ask you something, are you Muslim?”

He looked at me in the mirror. “Why do you ask me this?”

“I’m just curious, because if you are, then wouldn’t the betel nut be … well…”

He slung his elbow over the seat and he faced me. His eyes were then back on the road. “I am Abdullah. Almost too much as it is.”

I laughed along with him.

“So where are we going?”

I told him the address.

A low tinny voice chirped from the cell phone’s receiver. Abdullah shouted back in his language.

I looked out the window.

Why take the long way home? Why go out of my way?

A small boy swung from a fire escape on the first-floor front of a high-rise apartment building, and then the boy was gone, and then the building was gone, which was then replaced by other buildings, and storefronts with apartments in the floors above, and more tall buildings. I thought of how this place was vertical, and of beaches, and I actually had trouble imagining them. I’d walked on how many beaches, and I was seriously having trouble picturing them. The West Coast is all horizontal. No need to build upward there. Just bulldoze inland, to the foothills and the flatlands, head for the deserts. And now I was finding real comfort in the difference. I saw the brick buildings and flat roofs crowded with satellite dishes. I saw the pizza shops, and more pizza shops, the 99-cent stores and the sidewalk sales. We drove by myriads of splintering telephone poles shot at with staple guns, and the flapping flyers promising miracles of overnight weight loss.

The elevated trains over Jamaica Avenue rattled overhead.