Writing Experiment: The Revelation of Richard Hughes
Another (and the best, I think) of my senior project stories. I love the idea, but there are a few things I'm not sure about.... Help would be great : )
The Revelation of Richard Hughes
‘Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?’
- from ‘Mystic’, by Sylvia Plath
-
His heart was going to stop. He felt it beating in his chest, too quickly, and fought the urge to vomit. Lightheadedness, flecks of light swimming in the air. He felt like was going to die. When he thought back on it, it was that fear he remembered most; it was the fear that he felt again and again, late at night, when he woke from a nightmare to silence and long, faint shadows across the floor.
He’d been walking out of the bar he went to to watch the boxing matches when it happened. An explosion of light so bright it blinded him, sent him stumbling back against the wall, arms raised to cover his face. It was only a few seconds later that he saw it, squinting blindly through his fingers: a bright, shining thing made of light more pure and golden than any summer sun.
God.
He was seeing God.
He supposed that, for anyone else, it might’ve been embarrassing that the first thing out of his mouth was ‘shit’, but he didn’t care. It slipped out, a thoughtless reaction. He was too concerned with the thing in front of him which, he assumed later, was man-shaped, because he didn’t remember, but he did remember how the face changed. One second it was a woman, the next a man, a boy, a woman again, brown-haired then blonde, with a larger nose. That was what made an impression on him, those features melting and re-shaping in an instant, disturbing in their impossibility. And it was strange, but he couldn’t quite focus on it. It was shivering, like a bad television picture; shaky camera, nightmare commercial. Like it was fake.
Oh, but it wasn’t, couldn’t be, not when his heart spasmed the way it did, when it filled with terror. He felt the bricks of the alleyway wall press into his back, his fingers clutching at them, just to have something to hold onto. And it was there, too. He might have reached out to touch it, had his legs not given out beneath him. He slid to the ground - mouth open, he was sure, probably whispering something stupid like ‘oh, oh, oh’. Probably fluttering his hands like a woman too, only he couldn’t remember - and just… sat there. He forgot language, logic, sense; everything left him. And eventually - how much time passed he wasn’t sure; it could have been a few minutes or an hour - God disappeared. He vanished like a magician, popping out of existence as easily a rabbit, a handkerchief, a beautiful woman from her box, only there was no box. There were no strings, no trapdoor, not even a hat.
He sat with his back to the wall until the cold seeped into his skin, and then, still in shock, he got to his feet and started home.
He could easily have died, he thought as he walked; God could have reached out and killed him like a basilisk, with a glance, or maybe less, maybe a thought would have done it. And he’d only gone outside to smoke - that was what he thought a few minutes later, drinking tap water and leaning on his kitchen counter. The cigarettes were still in his pocket; Lucky Strikes, the little red bulls-eye resting over his heart. His hands shook as he filled the glass again and, when he nearly dropped it, he set it aside and gripped the counter instead - with both hands, hard, sinking his head between his arms.
“Shit,” he whispered. His body was still shaking; hands, arms, legs, everything out of control. Everything weak. “Shit shit shit!” His hands came down against the counter, hard, for the last word. He could feel himself unraveling, his body giving out and his mind going to pieces, terrible as the face of that thing he’d seen - because it was difficult to think of it as God, though there was no doubt that that was what He in fact was, but -
Enough.
With a deep breath, head thrown back, he stopped himself. He brought out the pack of cigarettes with trembling fingers, lit one, and after the fifth or sixth breath - deep breaths, smoke rolling hotly down his throat - his body began to slow, everything fading into a mellower, calmer mood. His breath lost its funny, panicked little hitches, and by the time he finished the cigarette, his nerves had grown calm as well.
“Okay Richard,” he mumbled, lighting a second. “Okay. You’re fine, man. That was… well, you just saw God, yeah, but you’re okay. You’ve got work tomorrow, and you can’t go in if you’re this messed up.”
He sat at the kitchen table, slumping down until his cheek rested against the wood. Every now and then he brought the cigarette to his lips. He was trying to think, trying to make sense of things, but everything slipped through his fingers and he couldn’t catch the thoughts he wanted. It was two in the morning when he padded out of the kitchen, in his socks, to bed.
x
Richard went to work the next day, but in the end he couldn’t handle it. Every voice made him start; every touch made him flinch; every bright light or sudden movement made him jerk back, memories of noise and light and terror flooding into his head. He told his boss he felt sick and went home, sitting in the back of the bus, fidgeting and trying not to act suspicious as two women talked loudly in the stiff, vibrating silence.
It was a peculiar thing to sit among all those strangers - men and women and children - and realize they didn’t know what he’d seen. He found himself wanting to leap to his feet, to scream at them, to wake them up; he could hardly stand it….
He needed to tell someone, so when the bus dropped him off at his stop, he walked quickly home and called his sister. She was there in fifteen minutes, knocking at the door, peering through the window when he took too long to get there. A small, energetic woman with short brown hair, she was leader of three church groups and passionately devoted to her faith. This last frequently annoyed him; she slipped God into entirely irrelevant conversations about dogs, laundry and so forth, and though her persistence was irritating rather than inspiring, they had, over the years, remained close.
He greeted her with a warm smile, a little surprised when she hugged him, thin arms wrapping around his midsection.
“How’ve you been?” she asked.
“Um… alright, I guess.” And then, to change the subject: “It’s so good to see you, Caroline, you have no idea.”
“You too,” she laughed, stepping back. “So what’s up?”
He paused. A dog barked in a neighboring yard. “Um… well, do you want to sit down?” he asked. “It’ll probably take a while.”
In that moment, her eyebrows rose and her mouth opened, poised to speak. “You got some poor girl pregnant, didn’t you,” she said waspishly, and he was so surprised he laughed, too hard, with his hands on his knees.
“God no,” he said, “I didn’t get anyone pregnant. But I almost wish I had.”
He led her to the table, sat her down, and began talking, slowly at first, nervous and unsure if she’d believe him and then, as she leaned forward, blue eyes intent on his, more fluently. He described the alleyway, the cool, unassuming shadows, the bewildering explosion of light. He described the terrible shifting faces, and how weak and sick he’d felt afterward; the fear he’d
felt - the fear he still felt. When he finished twenty minutes later, Caroline was silent. She stared at the wall behind his head, fingers to her lips and a strange, fixed expression on her face. Time passed.
“We have to tell my church,” she said finally. “I mean my gosh, Richard, do you realize what this means? What this really means? We could bring so many people to God with your story!” She was smiling openly now, unable to contain herself. “Oh, this is so exciting!”
“I don’t think you -” he started, but she was standing up, collecting her purse and jacket and pulling out her phone. Even from a distance he could see the excitement spilling out of her. It was an effusive, infectious excitement, visible in every line of her body, but it made him ill, as though he’d stumbled upon something he shouldn’t have.
“Caroline you - you didn’t get what I said at all; it wasn’t… I was scared out of my mind!”
She smiled, pausing in the doorway. “Well, it was God, silly, what did you expect?”
The door clicked shut with ominous finality, and he was alone.
Dumbfounded, he listened to her car start, pull away, and disappear. For a few long moments, the only sound was his clock, ticking calmly away above the kitchen table. Then a small, thin ringing began in his ears, like the whine of mosquitoes, and he stood up, walking to the cupboard where he found a glass and filled it with whiskey. He was beginning to panic. He could feel his breath catch in his chest, as though he were having an asthma attack, and he was honestly afraid he might die, there in the kitchen with a glass of whiskey.
An image rose unbidden in his mind’s eye: close-set brick walls, everything grey and cold, a sudden flash of light. Features melting into one another and then re-shaping themselves. It was only three o’clock, but hours of worry had settled behind his eyes, and a few minutes later he fell into bed, exhausted.
But even there the images followed him. It was something he would dream about for days to come: explosions of light; fear; familiar people metamorphosing into slouching, black-clawed creatures that pursued him down hallways. He would come upon them suddenly, in a shuddering, heart-stopping instant, and then his vision would go and he would wake, sweat-soaked and flailing, to the same white walls, the same furniture and photographs he’d fallen asleep to.
It was the nightmares, more than anything else, that got to him. In the two days of silence after Caroline visited he got five hours of sleep, and the exhaustion made him haggard, sallow-skinned, and irritable. He didn’t go to work; he called in sick, said he had stomach flu, strep throat, a fever. He was smoking more. Drinking more. It was the only way he knew to keep from going to pieces, and if he kept himself in that altered state of consciousness long enough, he thought, maybe he’d forget all about it, emerging from an alcoholic haze with a few half-formed memories, and no fear.
The plan, though effective, meant he was drunk most of the time. It meant that, in the days following the encounter, his moods alternated between panic and calm, panic and calm, relentless and erratic as a trapped animal. It meant that, as he lay on the couch each night, drunk into oblivion, he sometimes saw things skittering across the ceiling. And every time he would jump, catching himself in the middle of a drink so that he inhaled whiskey instead of air, and ended up coughing, reaching blindly for the light switch.
x
Caroline came by two days later, in a light black coat with a Bible tucked under her arm. “If you have any questions,” she said when he asked her about it. He took her coat and she thanked him; they moved into the kitchen, and there Caroline saw the whiskey on the table, a half-empty cigarette pack beside it.
“You’ve been drinking a lot,” she said carefully. “I saw the bottles in your recycling. And this house reeks of smoke…. Richard, what’s going on? Why are you -”
“Alcohol and cigarettes have been a bigger help than you have,” he hissed. “Last time you came you completely missed what I was trying to tell you. When I saw God; it wasn’t what you thought at all.”
“I did hear you, but He’s God; we’re supposed to fear Him.” This was something she liked talking about, though Richard had never understood it. As a kid he’d thought of God as a father-figure, but when he reached high school, and Adult Living classes, he’d been told that if he ever felt genuinely afraid of his parents he should call the police.
“We’re supposed to fear Him, Richard,” Caroline repeated, more softly.
“Not like this!” he said, stepping away from her. “I’ve been having nightmares about it; I can’t think. I remember things, every day, and I imagine things, which is even worse. I’ll walk around a corner and think I see Him, and I don’t want to fall to my knees and worship Him, dammit; I want to run for my life! Do you get that? You wouldn’t listen last time, but, shit, if -”
She moved to touch his shoulder, but he jerked away, cutting himself off.
“Richard,” she said, “you’re being really stupid about all of this…. Listen, I talked to my pastor the other day, and he said he’d like to meet you. It’d be great if you could come to church this Sunday and talk to the congregation, you know, just to tell them what you saw? Please? It’d mean a lot to me….”
Silently, he carried his whiskey to the sink and downed it in bitter defiance. It was then that he felt Caroline’s hand on his shoulder, cool and smooth against the side of his neck, her soft voice just a few feet away.
“Richard -”
“I think,” Richard said to her, “that maybe you should go now.”
“Oh, but you have to see what I’ve got planned first.” She pulled him toward the door, that old enthusiasm bubbling up again. “Just come meet my pastor, please?”
Reluctantly, flashes of light and black-clawed creatures hanging at the edges of his vision, he followed her to the car and climbed in. The noise of the engine was sudden and ugly, out of place in the afternoon stillness. As they pulled away from the curb, Caroline reached for the radio dial, turning it, predictably, to a worship station. It was up too high at first - a blast of sound too loud to make out, just sudden pain in his ears - until he slapped it off altogether.
Caroline looked at him sheepishly. “Sorry about that,” she said.
The streets were quiet, mostly; there was a bike up ahead, and Richard heard it long before he ever saw it. It was the kind with beads stuck in the spokes, so that, as the wheels turned, they knocked against each other in a rhythmic clink-clink-clink. A flash of light caught his eye, and for an instant he was thrown back to the alleyway: explosion of light; explosion of terror. He seized up, hands claw-like on the armrests. Then he realized it was just a reflection from the bike, a flash of sun on metal. Harmless.
Beside him, Caroline waved to the cyclist, a large, red-headed boy in beach shorts. “That’s Sam,” she said as they passed. “He volunteers sometimes for our children’s ministry.”
Richard, frozen in the passenger seat, barely heard her.
When they arrived at the church, all beige paint and paneled walls, he followed Caroline in just as he had when they were children, slowly, with his hands in his pockets. It was a small church, and there was very little about it that made an impression on him. The walls were white; it was quiet; but there was nothing particularly sanctimonious about it. He might as well have been walking into a hotel.
They reached the pastor’s office, and Caroline knocked once, briskly, and walked in without waiting for an answer. Richard followed.
The pastor - a thin, balding man in beige slacks, who was undisturbed by their sudden entrance - rose to shake his hand. “Welcome to Trinity Church,” he said heartily. “Caroline’s told me a lot about you.”
“I know,” muttered Richard, shaking his hand briefly and without much enthusiasm.
The pastor laughed. “Make yourself comfortable, won’t you - Richard, isn’t it? I don’t think you realize how lucky you are, son!”
Richard made a funny little noise through his nose. “Oh no, I do,” he said quietly, but the pastor, whose name, according to the nameplate tacked to his desk, was Dan, had turned to Caroline, and they talked for a minute or so about the children’s ministry, and a new woman they’d hired the week before. By the time they finished, a bored Richard had taken to staring out the window, tapping a rhythm out against his thigh.
Several minutes later, Dan cleared his throat. Richard looked up. The pastor had leaned back in his chair, hands folded over his not inconsiderable stomach. Once he had Richard’s attention he began, in a slightly didactic tone:
“Traditionally, people don’t believe you when you say you’ve seen God. They pass it off as a hallucination; same thing with near-death experiences. But I’ve found that if it’s presented in an official way, say, through a book or a well-established radio station, it’s much better accepted. We should get a good response from the congregation,” he said, “and if things go well enough I might be able to arrange something with other churches in the area.”
It was at about this point that Richard lost interest. There was a clock bolted to the wall opposite, a small carved clock with a pendulum, not at all the kind you’d expect to see in an office. There was something inscribed above the face, but Richard couldn’t make it out from where he sat. It was probably a Bible verse.
“I’d like you to talk to them personally, if you wouldn’t mind,” Dan continued dimly in the background. “Putting a face on this would make it easier to swallow, if you know what I mean…. I’ve, ah, put together a speech for Richard, based on what you told me, and if you and he could look it over and make any necessary changes I’d really appreciate it.” He handed a few sheets of paper to Caroline while Richard, who’d turned around when he heard his name, stared at him from across the desk.
“Who ever said I was going to do this?” Richard asked sharply.
Dan blinked at him. “Well… it was kind of understood, wasn’t it? Otherwise you wouldn’t have come. It was your sister who had the idea, you know, and said she explained everything to you and that -”
“Well I’m not doing it.”
“But - but think of what this means to the church! You can’t just -”
“You don’t get it,” Richard said loudly, standing up. Dan had stopped, eyes wide, and Richard didn’t know it but his hands were shaking again and his eyes, red from the whiskey, were brighter than usual. “Caroline told you what happened, but I’ll bet you anything she didn’t tell it right. Seeing God was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced, and I don’t think you’re getting that. It was like being confronted by a serial killer, like Death himself had come out of the darkness and pointed at me. That’s what I thought, you know; I thought I was gonna die and I was so, so afraid, and you just don’t understand, dammit!”
Breathing hard, he leaned back and tried to calm himself. His words had left him half hysterical, alarmingly close to tears, and when Dan spoke - calmly, soothingly - Richard lost it.
“Do you remember how terrified the prophets were when angels appeared to them, Richard? It’s perfectly natural to feel afraid when God -”
“Fuck, no it isn’t! It isn’t, dammit!” From the corner of his eye he saw Caroline’s shocked expression, but he ignored her. “You keep saying it’s normal, that I should get over it and fucking cooperate, but I can’t when you’re not listening to what I’m fucking saying!”
He stormed out of the room, trembling, not in anger but in frustrated, panicked disbelief. They didn’t stop him.
Down hallways, through doorways and into the bright autumn sun. He walked quickly, with his hands in his pockets. It was a warm day, bright and beautiful, but somehow sad: bare sidewalks and silence, the streets no more welcoming than they’d been several nights ago, when he walked down them like a shell-shocked veteran.
His shoes clapped against the sidewalk. No cars passed, though it was late afternoon and there should have been some traffic, some life, not this stiff, oppressive silence bearing down like a heat wave. Home, when he reached it, was dark and silent, its blank, curtained windows staring out into the street. Inside he downed glass after glass of whiskey until he couldn’t stand, and, letting his legs give way beneath him, collapsed backward onto the couch.
That night, he dreamt someone broke into the house. When he went to see who it was, he found the front window shattered but the living room empty, perfectly silent, curtains swaying in the breeze. The room had taken on that eerie, menacing quality which nightmares so often have, and Richard, shaken, bolted from the room, pajama bottoms flapping white and ghostly against his legs.
Somehow he ended up outside, on the porch, a man standing a few feet away with his back turned. Richard couldn’t see his face, but in the dream he knew this was the person who had smashed the window. He opened his mouth to speak, and the man turned to face him, very quickly.
He had no face, and the sight was of it - blank spaces where the eyes, the nose, the lips should have been, just a black hole for a mouth - struck Richard stumbling backward, screaming, falling and falling into that dark pit of a mouth and the blankness of the eye sockets until he hit the couch, flailing, knocking over the whiskey glass he’d left balanced on the arm. It fell off and shattered, bright fragments of glass skittering over the floor like stars.
x
There was a message on the answering machine when he woke up the next morning. He listened to it with both elbows on the counter, sipping at a glass of Sprite and vodka.
“Hey, Richard?” It was Caroline. “I’m just calling to see how you’re doing. I came by an hour ago but you didn’t answer the door, so... I just wanted to make sure you were alright. You left so fast earlier, and I know you were upset, but we don’t know where you’re coming from…. You don’t have to talk on Sunday if you don’t want, I mean, you could come and stand there, and Dan could tell your story. I just…” She sighed. Hiss of breath through the receiver.
“Call me when you get this, okay? You’ve been really weird lately, drinking too much, smoking too much, and I just... I don’t….” A long pause. Another sigh. “It’s about nine right now. I’ll be up until ten, and then I’m going to the gym tomorrow morning at… eleven o’clock. Call me please, Richard? I’ll come by Sunday morning to pick you up, at eight thirty, so I’ll see you then. Love you.”
It was a long message, and by the time it ended he’d finished his drink and gone for a second. The clock on the stove read 9:27.
x
That Sunday, Richard woke to his blinds flapping open with a horrendous crash, sunlight spilling in mercilessly over his bed. He sat up with a startled cry. The sudden transition from sleep to wakefulness left him momentarily blinded, and a few moments passed before he saw Caroline standing, arms crossed, by the window. She was just a silhouette, dark and fuzzy, sunlight diffusing into her blouse, her bare arms, the ends of her hair. Dizzily, Richard thought of angels, armed with trumpets and bowls of fire.
“I said I’d be here at eight thirty,” she said, unfolding her arms and going to his closet, where she pulled out a shirt and slacks. “It’s a good thing I came early, since you’re not even up. And you were drinking again last night, I see,” she added, snatching a bottle from his dresser. She left the room, and he could hear her feet moving through the kitchen, then the sound of the back door opening and the clink of glass on glass.
When she returned and saw he hadn’t moved, she took the clothes, which still lay neatly folded at the end of the bed, and shoved them into his arms. “You have five minutes,” she said. “I’ll make you a bagel or something, and then we have to go.”
Confused, Richard did as she’d told him. He spent almost a minute trying to get his shirt on, and by the time he padded out into the kitchen - in his socks, with his hair undone - Caroline had finished with the bagels.
She handed them to him balanced in his shoes. “Come on, we can comb your hair when we get there.”
“Wait,” Richard said suddenly. But Caroline was already out the door, and he stopped, arms full of shoes, fingers white with cream cheese. “Caroline… what’s this for? Where are we going?”
She stopped on the pavement, halfway to the car. “To church, Richard,” she said. “And we’re going to be late.”
Richard stopped. He’d forgotten all about it. He’d meant to call her the night before and tell her he couldn’t come, that, moreover, he didn’t want to come, but he’d taped the reminder to the refrigerator and then didn’t eat - just a cigarette and more whiskey - and forgot about it.
It was bright out. He had a pounding headache and it was difficult to think. Dizzily, he made his way down the front steps and slid into Caroline’s car, laying his things on the dashboard as they pulled away.
“Do you have any aspirin?” he asked.
Caroline reached into the glove compartment, and pulled out a small bottle. “Here,” she said, tossing it into his lap. “Maybe you should take two.”
“Do you have any water?”
“Nope.”
So he swallowed them dry, and then dug the heels of his palms into his eye sockets. Spots of light. Nausea. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”
“Do you want me to pull over?” Caroline asked, looking over at him.
“No.”
Last night had been terrible, alternating between nightmares and drinks of whiskey, and the flickering glow of the television at two o’clock in the morning. It had been a five days since that night in the alleyway. Five days since the nightmares and the drinking and the smoking had begun. Wasn’t it strange, he thought dimly, that, before he saw God, he hadn’t had a cigarette in days? Hadn’t gotten drunk in months? It was almost like -
The car jerked to a stop, throwing him forward a little against the dash. He’d forgotten to buckle his seatbelt.
Once he had his shoes on, Caroline grabbed his arm and hurried him toward the church. She left him sitting backstage, a small, dark area with pulleys for the curtains and a few chairs, and little else, with instructions to come out when Dan said him name. Sitting there in the dark, listening vaguely to Pastor Dan’s voice beyond the curtains, he became aware of the absurdity of all of this. That was what he told the woman who came to see if he needed anything: “This is stupid.”
“What is?” the woman asked quietly. She was holding a cup of water she’d brought for him, which he’d refused, and she looked a bit lost, as though she didn’t know what to do with herself now. She was, she told him later, a new staff member at the church; she’d been hired a week before, and was still settling in.
“All of this,” Richard said, gesturing to the room at large. Pulleys, lengths of rope, blank walls. The deep velvet of the curtains. He felt drunk. His heart had moved into his head, and it pounded there, strongly.
“I didn’t smoke or drink before any of this,” he said. “I was a good enough guy, and then….” He laughed. “I saw God.”
“Oh, you’re Richard?” the woman asked, with a spark of recognition. “Pastor Dan was talking about you the other day. He was so excited you were coming to speak.”
“Yeah? That’s cool. I was, um… well…. Dammit,” he swore, so loudly that the woman jumped. “I was a good guy before this happened; I was…. I mean… this has ruined my fucking life! And they don’t even believe me!”
“Who doesn’t?” the woman asked. She held the cup in both hands, and her voice was soft.
“Everyone.” There was a long silence, filled in with the low, indecipherable murmur of Dan’s preaching. Richard, slumped in the chair with his head thrown back, was absurdly close to tears.
“I’m losing it,” he mumbled. “This past week I’ve been trying to hold it together - cigarettes and alcohol, you know, nature’s best relaxers, but it’s all slipping away. God’s terrible,” he said suddenly. “I hope you never have to see Him.”
Just then a man poked his heard around the curtain, bright and amiable as a sparrow. “Your turn’s almost here, Richard,” he said, “Dan wanted me to let you know. He’s got your speech up at the pulpit, and he’ll leave it out for you, kay?”
Richard looked up, eyes taking longer than they should have to find the man’s face. “Sure,” he said. The man smiled, ducked back around the curtain.
The woman, whose name he never found out, hung around until they heard Dan say his name, whereupon she squeezed his arm and wished him luck, ducking out just as he stepped through the curtain.
There were actually quite a lot of people there, which surprised him; he hadn’t expected all these faces staring back at him. He’d always been nervous in front of crowds, but now, walking to the pulpit, he felt only anger. He didn’t want to be there. He hadn’t wanted to come at all; he’d said so to anyone who would listen and yet, inexplicably, here he was, about to give a speech on something that had happened but not in the way that he would tell it.
His speech waited for him at the pulpit, where Dan shook his hand - slack muscles, staring, zero acknowledgement of the gesture - and where he stood with his hands clenched and stared down at it. He read a few words, looked up; down; up again; began to speak and then stopped.
What would happen, he wondered, if he told these people what he’d really seen? What would happen if he didn’t say any of these pleasant things laid out in the speech, but spoke the truth: dark alleyway, flash of light, the feeling that his heart would stop, his head would burst, that he would die there in the presence of God; and then later, the nightmares, the steps taken to ensure he wouldn’t fall to pieces; the mood swings, the panic, the fear….
The crowd’s murmur swelled in his ears like an ocean. The world faded and got bright around the edges, and he felt himself swaying; he reached for the pulpit to steady himself and missed it completely, staggering back through the curtain, out the door. Someone, probably Caroline, came up behind him and took his arm, but he shook her off and kept going.
Down the same hallways, out the same doors, down the same sidewalks and streets and into the same kitchen as before. And as before, he had glass of whiskey - but this time only one. Pressing its cool side to his temple, he listened to the television talk about shootings and children who made cards for disaster victims. He had a cigarette. He walked from room to room in a daze, staring at furniture and wondering who was right and wrong about God, and if it even mattered. He had a shot of vodka, another cigarette.
By six o’clock he was very, very drunk; though he wasn’t slurring his words, he spoke carefully, as though he were just learning to talk. They were frantic words nonetheless, accompanied by shakes of his head, unraveling just as he had that first night, when he stumbled home, shaken, to a glass of whiskey. His hands pulled at his hair, as though trying to free some secret from his skull, something too deeply buried to give voice to but which might, if he pulled hard enough, inflicted enough pain, might reveal itself: an answer.
Dull calm had given way to violence, and he stalked through the house throwing things to the floor. Never anything large, just small things: knickknacks, books, ornamental vases, things that would satisfy him when they broke. This got old very fast, however, and he stood in the middle of all those small, broken things, unable to bring himself to clean it up.
“I can’t do this,” he said to the empty living room. “I’ve tried, and I can’t.”
x
Richard stood on the edge of the sidewalk, looking at his feet. They were really quite extraordinary, he thought, flexing his toes, watching his shoes bend with them. In fact, his whole body was extraordinary: brain, nervous system, muscles, heart, electrical charge; the way he could move with so little effort, like now, how he lifted a foot and slid it down the curb and into the street, how he lifted his other foot and brought it forward. How easy it was, he thought, and looked down the road.
It was a busy street, cars passing at the rate of two or three per second in heavy traffic, but it was getting late, and traffic was light. The air was still and cool, the flowers the city had planted - to ‘beautify the downtown area’ - hushed and expectant beneath the overcast sky.
(You are fearfully and wonderfully made!)
This is to spite you, he thought quietly. It was the closest he’d come to praying in almost eleven years.
x
That Sunday, Pastor Dan addressed his congregation with his hands resting, palms down, on a newspaper clipping. “Before we leave this morning, I’d like to share a sad piece of news. Richard Hughes,” he said slowly, “passed away last week, on Sunday evening. His sister, Caroline Hughes, has been a member of our church for six and a half years, and I’d like you to pray for her and her family. Ask God to comfort them, and let them know He’s with them even in their grief.
“Richard was supposed to speak to you last Sunday about an experience he had, but ended up too nervous to do it. I don’t think he’d mind me sharing his story with you today.” Dan paused, leaning forward to grip the pulpit with both hands. “In an alleyway downtown, a week since Tuesday, Richard saw God. It was an experience that affected him profoundly, and I only wish I was as lucky as he was. He knew he was lucky; he told me himself the first time I saw him. And though his death was a tragedy, I thank the Lord that Richard is now in Heaven, praising and worshipping Him without pain.”
When the applause faded, Caroline was the first to leave, her heels clicking all the way down the aisle.
end
The Revelation of Richard Hughes
‘Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?’
- from ‘Mystic’, by Sylvia Plath
-
His heart was going to stop. He felt it beating in his chest, too quickly, and fought the urge to vomit. Lightheadedness, flecks of light swimming in the air. He felt like was going to die. When he thought back on it, it was that fear he remembered most; it was the fear that he felt again and again, late at night, when he woke from a nightmare to silence and long, faint shadows across the floor.
He’d been walking out of the bar he went to to watch the boxing matches when it happened. An explosion of light so bright it blinded him, sent him stumbling back against the wall, arms raised to cover his face. It was only a few seconds later that he saw it, squinting blindly through his fingers: a bright, shining thing made of light more pure and golden than any summer sun.
God.
He was seeing God.
He supposed that, for anyone else, it might’ve been embarrassing that the first thing out of his mouth was ‘shit’, but he didn’t care. It slipped out, a thoughtless reaction. He was too concerned with the thing in front of him which, he assumed later, was man-shaped, because he didn’t remember, but he did remember how the face changed. One second it was a woman, the next a man, a boy, a woman again, brown-haired then blonde, with a larger nose. That was what made an impression on him, those features melting and re-shaping in an instant, disturbing in their impossibility. And it was strange, but he couldn’t quite focus on it. It was shivering, like a bad television picture; shaky camera, nightmare commercial. Like it was fake.
Oh, but it wasn’t, couldn’t be, not when his heart spasmed the way it did, when it filled with terror. He felt the bricks of the alleyway wall press into his back, his fingers clutching at them, just to have something to hold onto. And it was there, too. He might have reached out to touch it, had his legs not given out beneath him. He slid to the ground - mouth open, he was sure, probably whispering something stupid like ‘oh, oh, oh’. Probably fluttering his hands like a woman too, only he couldn’t remember - and just… sat there. He forgot language, logic, sense; everything left him. And eventually - how much time passed he wasn’t sure; it could have been a few minutes or an hour - God disappeared. He vanished like a magician, popping out of existence as easily a rabbit, a handkerchief, a beautiful woman from her box, only there was no box. There were no strings, no trapdoor, not even a hat.
He sat with his back to the wall until the cold seeped into his skin, and then, still in shock, he got to his feet and started home.
He could easily have died, he thought as he walked; God could have reached out and killed him like a basilisk, with a glance, or maybe less, maybe a thought would have done it. And he’d only gone outside to smoke - that was what he thought a few minutes later, drinking tap water and leaning on his kitchen counter. The cigarettes were still in his pocket; Lucky Strikes, the little red bulls-eye resting over his heart. His hands shook as he filled the glass again and, when he nearly dropped it, he set it aside and gripped the counter instead - with both hands, hard, sinking his head between his arms.
“Shit,” he whispered. His body was still shaking; hands, arms, legs, everything out of control. Everything weak. “Shit shit shit!” His hands came down against the counter, hard, for the last word. He could feel himself unraveling, his body giving out and his mind going to pieces, terrible as the face of that thing he’d seen - because it was difficult to think of it as God, though there was no doubt that that was what He in fact was, but -
Enough.
With a deep breath, head thrown back, he stopped himself. He brought out the pack of cigarettes with trembling fingers, lit one, and after the fifth or sixth breath - deep breaths, smoke rolling hotly down his throat - his body began to slow, everything fading into a mellower, calmer mood. His breath lost its funny, panicked little hitches, and by the time he finished the cigarette, his nerves had grown calm as well.
“Okay Richard,” he mumbled, lighting a second. “Okay. You’re fine, man. That was… well, you just saw God, yeah, but you’re okay. You’ve got work tomorrow, and you can’t go in if you’re this messed up.”
He sat at the kitchen table, slumping down until his cheek rested against the wood. Every now and then he brought the cigarette to his lips. He was trying to think, trying to make sense of things, but everything slipped through his fingers and he couldn’t catch the thoughts he wanted. It was two in the morning when he padded out of the kitchen, in his socks, to bed.
x
Richard went to work the next day, but in the end he couldn’t handle it. Every voice made him start; every touch made him flinch; every bright light or sudden movement made him jerk back, memories of noise and light and terror flooding into his head. He told his boss he felt sick and went home, sitting in the back of the bus, fidgeting and trying not to act suspicious as two women talked loudly in the stiff, vibrating silence.
It was a peculiar thing to sit among all those strangers - men and women and children - and realize they didn’t know what he’d seen. He found himself wanting to leap to his feet, to scream at them, to wake them up; he could hardly stand it….
He needed to tell someone, so when the bus dropped him off at his stop, he walked quickly home and called his sister. She was there in fifteen minutes, knocking at the door, peering through the window when he took too long to get there. A small, energetic woman with short brown hair, she was leader of three church groups and passionately devoted to her faith. This last frequently annoyed him; she slipped God into entirely irrelevant conversations about dogs, laundry and so forth, and though her persistence was irritating rather than inspiring, they had, over the years, remained close.
He greeted her with a warm smile, a little surprised when she hugged him, thin arms wrapping around his midsection.
“How’ve you been?” she asked.
“Um… alright, I guess.” And then, to change the subject: “It’s so good to see you, Caroline, you have no idea.”
“You too,” she laughed, stepping back. “So what’s up?”
He paused. A dog barked in a neighboring yard. “Um… well, do you want to sit down?” he asked. “It’ll probably take a while.”
In that moment, her eyebrows rose and her mouth opened, poised to speak. “You got some poor girl pregnant, didn’t you,” she said waspishly, and he was so surprised he laughed, too hard, with his hands on his knees.
“God no,” he said, “I didn’t get anyone pregnant. But I almost wish I had.”
He led her to the table, sat her down, and began talking, slowly at first, nervous and unsure if she’d believe him and then, as she leaned forward, blue eyes intent on his, more fluently. He described the alleyway, the cool, unassuming shadows, the bewildering explosion of light. He described the terrible shifting faces, and how weak and sick he’d felt afterward; the fear he’d
felt - the fear he still felt. When he finished twenty minutes later, Caroline was silent. She stared at the wall behind his head, fingers to her lips and a strange, fixed expression on her face. Time passed.
“We have to tell my church,” she said finally. “I mean my gosh, Richard, do you realize what this means? What this really means? We could bring so many people to God with your story!” She was smiling openly now, unable to contain herself. “Oh, this is so exciting!”
“I don’t think you -” he started, but she was standing up, collecting her purse and jacket and pulling out her phone. Even from a distance he could see the excitement spilling out of her. It was an effusive, infectious excitement, visible in every line of her body, but it made him ill, as though he’d stumbled upon something he shouldn’t have.
“Caroline you - you didn’t get what I said at all; it wasn’t… I was scared out of my mind!”
She smiled, pausing in the doorway. “Well, it was God, silly, what did you expect?”
The door clicked shut with ominous finality, and he was alone.
Dumbfounded, he listened to her car start, pull away, and disappear. For a few long moments, the only sound was his clock, ticking calmly away above the kitchen table. Then a small, thin ringing began in his ears, like the whine of mosquitoes, and he stood up, walking to the cupboard where he found a glass and filled it with whiskey. He was beginning to panic. He could feel his breath catch in his chest, as though he were having an asthma attack, and he was honestly afraid he might die, there in the kitchen with a glass of whiskey.
An image rose unbidden in his mind’s eye: close-set brick walls, everything grey and cold, a sudden flash of light. Features melting into one another and then re-shaping themselves. It was only three o’clock, but hours of worry had settled behind his eyes, and a few minutes later he fell into bed, exhausted.
But even there the images followed him. It was something he would dream about for days to come: explosions of light; fear; familiar people metamorphosing into slouching, black-clawed creatures that pursued him down hallways. He would come upon them suddenly, in a shuddering, heart-stopping instant, and then his vision would go and he would wake, sweat-soaked and flailing, to the same white walls, the same furniture and photographs he’d fallen asleep to.
It was the nightmares, more than anything else, that got to him. In the two days of silence after Caroline visited he got five hours of sleep, and the exhaustion made him haggard, sallow-skinned, and irritable. He didn’t go to work; he called in sick, said he had stomach flu, strep throat, a fever. He was smoking more. Drinking more. It was the only way he knew to keep from going to pieces, and if he kept himself in that altered state of consciousness long enough, he thought, maybe he’d forget all about it, emerging from an alcoholic haze with a few half-formed memories, and no fear.
The plan, though effective, meant he was drunk most of the time. It meant that, in the days following the encounter, his moods alternated between panic and calm, panic and calm, relentless and erratic as a trapped animal. It meant that, as he lay on the couch each night, drunk into oblivion, he sometimes saw things skittering across the ceiling. And every time he would jump, catching himself in the middle of a drink so that he inhaled whiskey instead of air, and ended up coughing, reaching blindly for the light switch.
x
Caroline came by two days later, in a light black coat with a Bible tucked under her arm. “If you have any questions,” she said when he asked her about it. He took her coat and she thanked him; they moved into the kitchen, and there Caroline saw the whiskey on the table, a half-empty cigarette pack beside it.
“You’ve been drinking a lot,” she said carefully. “I saw the bottles in your recycling. And this house reeks of smoke…. Richard, what’s going on? Why are you -”
“Alcohol and cigarettes have been a bigger help than you have,” he hissed. “Last time you came you completely missed what I was trying to tell you. When I saw God; it wasn’t what you thought at all.”
“I did hear you, but He’s God; we’re supposed to fear Him.” This was something she liked talking about, though Richard had never understood it. As a kid he’d thought of God as a father-figure, but when he reached high school, and Adult Living classes, he’d been told that if he ever felt genuinely afraid of his parents he should call the police.
“We’re supposed to fear Him, Richard,” Caroline repeated, more softly.
“Not like this!” he said, stepping away from her. “I’ve been having nightmares about it; I can’t think. I remember things, every day, and I imagine things, which is even worse. I’ll walk around a corner and think I see Him, and I don’t want to fall to my knees and worship Him, dammit; I want to run for my life! Do you get that? You wouldn’t listen last time, but, shit, if -”
She moved to touch his shoulder, but he jerked away, cutting himself off.
“Richard,” she said, “you’re being really stupid about all of this…. Listen, I talked to my pastor the other day, and he said he’d like to meet you. It’d be great if you could come to church this Sunday and talk to the congregation, you know, just to tell them what you saw? Please? It’d mean a lot to me….”
Silently, he carried his whiskey to the sink and downed it in bitter defiance. It was then that he felt Caroline’s hand on his shoulder, cool and smooth against the side of his neck, her soft voice just a few feet away.
“Richard -”
“I think,” Richard said to her, “that maybe you should go now.”
“Oh, but you have to see what I’ve got planned first.” She pulled him toward the door, that old enthusiasm bubbling up again. “Just come meet my pastor, please?”
Reluctantly, flashes of light and black-clawed creatures hanging at the edges of his vision, he followed her to the car and climbed in. The noise of the engine was sudden and ugly, out of place in the afternoon stillness. As they pulled away from the curb, Caroline reached for the radio dial, turning it, predictably, to a worship station. It was up too high at first - a blast of sound too loud to make out, just sudden pain in his ears - until he slapped it off altogether.
Caroline looked at him sheepishly. “Sorry about that,” she said.
The streets were quiet, mostly; there was a bike up ahead, and Richard heard it long before he ever saw it. It was the kind with beads stuck in the spokes, so that, as the wheels turned, they knocked against each other in a rhythmic clink-clink-clink. A flash of light caught his eye, and for an instant he was thrown back to the alleyway: explosion of light; explosion of terror. He seized up, hands claw-like on the armrests. Then he realized it was just a reflection from the bike, a flash of sun on metal. Harmless.
Beside him, Caroline waved to the cyclist, a large, red-headed boy in beach shorts. “That’s Sam,” she said as they passed. “He volunteers sometimes for our children’s ministry.”
Richard, frozen in the passenger seat, barely heard her.
When they arrived at the church, all beige paint and paneled walls, he followed Caroline in just as he had when they were children, slowly, with his hands in his pockets. It was a small church, and there was very little about it that made an impression on him. The walls were white; it was quiet; but there was nothing particularly sanctimonious about it. He might as well have been walking into a hotel.
They reached the pastor’s office, and Caroline knocked once, briskly, and walked in without waiting for an answer. Richard followed.
The pastor - a thin, balding man in beige slacks, who was undisturbed by their sudden entrance - rose to shake his hand. “Welcome to Trinity Church,” he said heartily. “Caroline’s told me a lot about you.”
“I know,” muttered Richard, shaking his hand briefly and without much enthusiasm.
The pastor laughed. “Make yourself comfortable, won’t you - Richard, isn’t it? I don’t think you realize how lucky you are, son!”
Richard made a funny little noise through his nose. “Oh no, I do,” he said quietly, but the pastor, whose name, according to the nameplate tacked to his desk, was Dan, had turned to Caroline, and they talked for a minute or so about the children’s ministry, and a new woman they’d hired the week before. By the time they finished, a bored Richard had taken to staring out the window, tapping a rhythm out against his thigh.
Several minutes later, Dan cleared his throat. Richard looked up. The pastor had leaned back in his chair, hands folded over his not inconsiderable stomach. Once he had Richard’s attention he began, in a slightly didactic tone:
“Traditionally, people don’t believe you when you say you’ve seen God. They pass it off as a hallucination; same thing with near-death experiences. But I’ve found that if it’s presented in an official way, say, through a book or a well-established radio station, it’s much better accepted. We should get a good response from the congregation,” he said, “and if things go well enough I might be able to arrange something with other churches in the area.”
It was at about this point that Richard lost interest. There was a clock bolted to the wall opposite, a small carved clock with a pendulum, not at all the kind you’d expect to see in an office. There was something inscribed above the face, but Richard couldn’t make it out from where he sat. It was probably a Bible verse.
“I’d like you to talk to them personally, if you wouldn’t mind,” Dan continued dimly in the background. “Putting a face on this would make it easier to swallow, if you know what I mean…. I’ve, ah, put together a speech for Richard, based on what you told me, and if you and he could look it over and make any necessary changes I’d really appreciate it.” He handed a few sheets of paper to Caroline while Richard, who’d turned around when he heard his name, stared at him from across the desk.
“Who ever said I was going to do this?” Richard asked sharply.
Dan blinked at him. “Well… it was kind of understood, wasn’t it? Otherwise you wouldn’t have come. It was your sister who had the idea, you know, and said she explained everything to you and that -”
“Well I’m not doing it.”
“But - but think of what this means to the church! You can’t just -”
“You don’t get it,” Richard said loudly, standing up. Dan had stopped, eyes wide, and Richard didn’t know it but his hands were shaking again and his eyes, red from the whiskey, were brighter than usual. “Caroline told you what happened, but I’ll bet you anything she didn’t tell it right. Seeing God was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced, and I don’t think you’re getting that. It was like being confronted by a serial killer, like Death himself had come out of the darkness and pointed at me. That’s what I thought, you know; I thought I was gonna die and I was so, so afraid, and you just don’t understand, dammit!”
Breathing hard, he leaned back and tried to calm himself. His words had left him half hysterical, alarmingly close to tears, and when Dan spoke - calmly, soothingly - Richard lost it.
“Do you remember how terrified the prophets were when angels appeared to them, Richard? It’s perfectly natural to feel afraid when God -”
“Fuck, no it isn’t! It isn’t, dammit!” From the corner of his eye he saw Caroline’s shocked expression, but he ignored her. “You keep saying it’s normal, that I should get over it and fucking cooperate, but I can’t when you’re not listening to what I’m fucking saying!”
He stormed out of the room, trembling, not in anger but in frustrated, panicked disbelief. They didn’t stop him.
Down hallways, through doorways and into the bright autumn sun. He walked quickly, with his hands in his pockets. It was a warm day, bright and beautiful, but somehow sad: bare sidewalks and silence, the streets no more welcoming than they’d been several nights ago, when he walked down them like a shell-shocked veteran.
His shoes clapped against the sidewalk. No cars passed, though it was late afternoon and there should have been some traffic, some life, not this stiff, oppressive silence bearing down like a heat wave. Home, when he reached it, was dark and silent, its blank, curtained windows staring out into the street. Inside he downed glass after glass of whiskey until he couldn’t stand, and, letting his legs give way beneath him, collapsed backward onto the couch.
That night, he dreamt someone broke into the house. When he went to see who it was, he found the front window shattered but the living room empty, perfectly silent, curtains swaying in the breeze. The room had taken on that eerie, menacing quality which nightmares so often have, and Richard, shaken, bolted from the room, pajama bottoms flapping white and ghostly against his legs.
Somehow he ended up outside, on the porch, a man standing a few feet away with his back turned. Richard couldn’t see his face, but in the dream he knew this was the person who had smashed the window. He opened his mouth to speak, and the man turned to face him, very quickly.
He had no face, and the sight was of it - blank spaces where the eyes, the nose, the lips should have been, just a black hole for a mouth - struck Richard stumbling backward, screaming, falling and falling into that dark pit of a mouth and the blankness of the eye sockets until he hit the couch, flailing, knocking over the whiskey glass he’d left balanced on the arm. It fell off and shattered, bright fragments of glass skittering over the floor like stars.
x
There was a message on the answering machine when he woke up the next morning. He listened to it with both elbows on the counter, sipping at a glass of Sprite and vodka.
“Hey, Richard?” It was Caroline. “I’m just calling to see how you’re doing. I came by an hour ago but you didn’t answer the door, so... I just wanted to make sure you were alright. You left so fast earlier, and I know you were upset, but we don’t know where you’re coming from…. You don’t have to talk on Sunday if you don’t want, I mean, you could come and stand there, and Dan could tell your story. I just…” She sighed. Hiss of breath through the receiver.
“Call me when you get this, okay? You’ve been really weird lately, drinking too much, smoking too much, and I just... I don’t….” A long pause. Another sigh. “It’s about nine right now. I’ll be up until ten, and then I’m going to the gym tomorrow morning at… eleven o’clock. Call me please, Richard? I’ll come by Sunday morning to pick you up, at eight thirty, so I’ll see you then. Love you.”
It was a long message, and by the time it ended he’d finished his drink and gone for a second. The clock on the stove read 9:27.
x
That Sunday, Richard woke to his blinds flapping open with a horrendous crash, sunlight spilling in mercilessly over his bed. He sat up with a startled cry. The sudden transition from sleep to wakefulness left him momentarily blinded, and a few moments passed before he saw Caroline standing, arms crossed, by the window. She was just a silhouette, dark and fuzzy, sunlight diffusing into her blouse, her bare arms, the ends of her hair. Dizzily, Richard thought of angels, armed with trumpets and bowls of fire.
“I said I’d be here at eight thirty,” she said, unfolding her arms and going to his closet, where she pulled out a shirt and slacks. “It’s a good thing I came early, since you’re not even up. And you were drinking again last night, I see,” she added, snatching a bottle from his dresser. She left the room, and he could hear her feet moving through the kitchen, then the sound of the back door opening and the clink of glass on glass.
When she returned and saw he hadn’t moved, she took the clothes, which still lay neatly folded at the end of the bed, and shoved them into his arms. “You have five minutes,” she said. “I’ll make you a bagel or something, and then we have to go.”
Confused, Richard did as she’d told him. He spent almost a minute trying to get his shirt on, and by the time he padded out into the kitchen - in his socks, with his hair undone - Caroline had finished with the bagels.
She handed them to him balanced in his shoes. “Come on, we can comb your hair when we get there.”
“Wait,” Richard said suddenly. But Caroline was already out the door, and he stopped, arms full of shoes, fingers white with cream cheese. “Caroline… what’s this for? Where are we going?”
She stopped on the pavement, halfway to the car. “To church, Richard,” she said. “And we’re going to be late.”
Richard stopped. He’d forgotten all about it. He’d meant to call her the night before and tell her he couldn’t come, that, moreover, he didn’t want to come, but he’d taped the reminder to the refrigerator and then didn’t eat - just a cigarette and more whiskey - and forgot about it.
It was bright out. He had a pounding headache and it was difficult to think. Dizzily, he made his way down the front steps and slid into Caroline’s car, laying his things on the dashboard as they pulled away.
“Do you have any aspirin?” he asked.
Caroline reached into the glove compartment, and pulled out a small bottle. “Here,” she said, tossing it into his lap. “Maybe you should take two.”
“Do you have any water?”
“Nope.”
So he swallowed them dry, and then dug the heels of his palms into his eye sockets. Spots of light. Nausea. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”
“Do you want me to pull over?” Caroline asked, looking over at him.
“No.”
Last night had been terrible, alternating between nightmares and drinks of whiskey, and the flickering glow of the television at two o’clock in the morning. It had been a five days since that night in the alleyway. Five days since the nightmares and the drinking and the smoking had begun. Wasn’t it strange, he thought dimly, that, before he saw God, he hadn’t had a cigarette in days? Hadn’t gotten drunk in months? It was almost like -
The car jerked to a stop, throwing him forward a little against the dash. He’d forgotten to buckle his seatbelt.
Once he had his shoes on, Caroline grabbed his arm and hurried him toward the church. She left him sitting backstage, a small, dark area with pulleys for the curtains and a few chairs, and little else, with instructions to come out when Dan said him name. Sitting there in the dark, listening vaguely to Pastor Dan’s voice beyond the curtains, he became aware of the absurdity of all of this. That was what he told the woman who came to see if he needed anything: “This is stupid.”
“What is?” the woman asked quietly. She was holding a cup of water she’d brought for him, which he’d refused, and she looked a bit lost, as though she didn’t know what to do with herself now. She was, she told him later, a new staff member at the church; she’d been hired a week before, and was still settling in.
“All of this,” Richard said, gesturing to the room at large. Pulleys, lengths of rope, blank walls. The deep velvet of the curtains. He felt drunk. His heart had moved into his head, and it pounded there, strongly.
“I didn’t smoke or drink before any of this,” he said. “I was a good enough guy, and then….” He laughed. “I saw God.”
“Oh, you’re Richard?” the woman asked, with a spark of recognition. “Pastor Dan was talking about you the other day. He was so excited you were coming to speak.”
“Yeah? That’s cool. I was, um… well…. Dammit,” he swore, so loudly that the woman jumped. “I was a good guy before this happened; I was…. I mean… this has ruined my fucking life! And they don’t even believe me!”
“Who doesn’t?” the woman asked. She held the cup in both hands, and her voice was soft.
“Everyone.” There was a long silence, filled in with the low, indecipherable murmur of Dan’s preaching. Richard, slumped in the chair with his head thrown back, was absurdly close to tears.
“I’m losing it,” he mumbled. “This past week I’ve been trying to hold it together - cigarettes and alcohol, you know, nature’s best relaxers, but it’s all slipping away. God’s terrible,” he said suddenly. “I hope you never have to see Him.”
Just then a man poked his heard around the curtain, bright and amiable as a sparrow. “Your turn’s almost here, Richard,” he said, “Dan wanted me to let you know. He’s got your speech up at the pulpit, and he’ll leave it out for you, kay?”
Richard looked up, eyes taking longer than they should have to find the man’s face. “Sure,” he said. The man smiled, ducked back around the curtain.
The woman, whose name he never found out, hung around until they heard Dan say his name, whereupon she squeezed his arm and wished him luck, ducking out just as he stepped through the curtain.
There were actually quite a lot of people there, which surprised him; he hadn’t expected all these faces staring back at him. He’d always been nervous in front of crowds, but now, walking to the pulpit, he felt only anger. He didn’t want to be there. He hadn’t wanted to come at all; he’d said so to anyone who would listen and yet, inexplicably, here he was, about to give a speech on something that had happened but not in the way that he would tell it.
His speech waited for him at the pulpit, where Dan shook his hand - slack muscles, staring, zero acknowledgement of the gesture - and where he stood with his hands clenched and stared down at it. He read a few words, looked up; down; up again; began to speak and then stopped.
What would happen, he wondered, if he told these people what he’d really seen? What would happen if he didn’t say any of these pleasant things laid out in the speech, but spoke the truth: dark alleyway, flash of light, the feeling that his heart would stop, his head would burst, that he would die there in the presence of God; and then later, the nightmares, the steps taken to ensure he wouldn’t fall to pieces; the mood swings, the panic, the fear….
The crowd’s murmur swelled in his ears like an ocean. The world faded and got bright around the edges, and he felt himself swaying; he reached for the pulpit to steady himself and missed it completely, staggering back through the curtain, out the door. Someone, probably Caroline, came up behind him and took his arm, but he shook her off and kept going.
Down the same hallways, out the same doors, down the same sidewalks and streets and into the same kitchen as before. And as before, he had glass of whiskey - but this time only one. Pressing its cool side to his temple, he listened to the television talk about shootings and children who made cards for disaster victims. He had a cigarette. He walked from room to room in a daze, staring at furniture and wondering who was right and wrong about God, and if it even mattered. He had a shot of vodka, another cigarette.
By six o’clock he was very, very drunk; though he wasn’t slurring his words, he spoke carefully, as though he were just learning to talk. They were frantic words nonetheless, accompanied by shakes of his head, unraveling just as he had that first night, when he stumbled home, shaken, to a glass of whiskey. His hands pulled at his hair, as though trying to free some secret from his skull, something too deeply buried to give voice to but which might, if he pulled hard enough, inflicted enough pain, might reveal itself: an answer.
Dull calm had given way to violence, and he stalked through the house throwing things to the floor. Never anything large, just small things: knickknacks, books, ornamental vases, things that would satisfy him when they broke. This got old very fast, however, and he stood in the middle of all those small, broken things, unable to bring himself to clean it up.
“I can’t do this,” he said to the empty living room. “I’ve tried, and I can’t.”
x
Richard stood on the edge of the sidewalk, looking at his feet. They were really quite extraordinary, he thought, flexing his toes, watching his shoes bend with them. In fact, his whole body was extraordinary: brain, nervous system, muscles, heart, electrical charge; the way he could move with so little effort, like now, how he lifted a foot and slid it down the curb and into the street, how he lifted his other foot and brought it forward. How easy it was, he thought, and looked down the road.
It was a busy street, cars passing at the rate of two or three per second in heavy traffic, but it was getting late, and traffic was light. The air was still and cool, the flowers the city had planted - to ‘beautify the downtown area’ - hushed and expectant beneath the overcast sky.
(You are fearfully and wonderfully made!)
This is to spite you, he thought quietly. It was the closest he’d come to praying in almost eleven years.
x
That Sunday, Pastor Dan addressed his congregation with his hands resting, palms down, on a newspaper clipping. “Before we leave this morning, I’d like to share a sad piece of news. Richard Hughes,” he said slowly, “passed away last week, on Sunday evening. His sister, Caroline Hughes, has been a member of our church for six and a half years, and I’d like you to pray for her and her family. Ask God to comfort them, and let them know He’s with them even in their grief.
“Richard was supposed to speak to you last Sunday about an experience he had, but ended up too nervous to do it. I don’t think he’d mind me sharing his story with you today.” Dan paused, leaning forward to grip the pulpit with both hands. “In an alleyway downtown, a week since Tuesday, Richard saw God. It was an experience that affected him profoundly, and I only wish I was as lucky as he was. He knew he was lucky; he told me himself the first time I saw him. And though his death was a tragedy, I thank the Lord that Richard is now in Heaven, praising and worshipping Him without pain.”
When the applause faded, Caroline was the first to leave, her heels clicking all the way down the aisle.
end