BEYOND THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD

CHAPTER 37-DISCIPLES

But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect.

--1 Corinthians 15:10

FATHER DICK’S POV


this little light of mine,
I’m gonna let it shine

Most of the priests you know have these moving stories about the exact moment they knew they were going to be priests, how God came to them in the middle of the night in the form of a pressing urge to excrete holy water and informed them of their true calling, and, to be fair, you always wished you had one of these stories to share with everyone at priestly conventions, but, alas, you didn’t. You tried to make one up once, “Well, the priesthood…it runs in my family. Same old story: my grandfather was a priest; my father was a priest, and well, here I am.” But you got a bunch of very strange looks and then, finally, one of the priests leaned over and said, “That’s not really possible, what with the celibacy and all.” (You were in Georgia at the time, and your informant smelled like collard greens).

“Just kidding,” you said by way of recovery, “Almost had you going, didn’t I?” But after that you were always the last one picked for gospel choir karaoke.

It’s just that the truth was far less inspirational. You grew up Catholic, the oldest child with three younger sisters. You were the only boy, a good son, a chronic, habitual over-achiever by all accounts: crawling early, walking early, running away from your parents and into oncoming traffic way too early. You went to church with your family, went to Sunday school in your little suit and tie and somehow became the church’s, and then the city’s, and the county’s, and then all of south Jersey’s pride and joy by memorizing more bible verses than anyone else and being able to blurt them out anywhere at a moment’s notice.

They put you in a booth at the state fair…when you were seven:

Stump Little Richie and Win Eternal Salvation!

Okay—no--they got three tries to stump you, and if they did, then they won a stuffed baby Jesus.

Danger in the Manger, Ladies and Gentleman! Step Right Up!

The walls of your childhood bedroom were adorned with little gold trophies that oddly had nothing godly (an under-used rhyme; oh, if only you’d written the bible instead of just memorized it…) about them; they were simply engraved with your name--Richie Donnelly--the date, and the number you’d recited at that particular setting. Your official record was one hundred and seventy six, but you could top two hundred when you were doing it in front of the mirror by yourself with your rosary beads.

So, off the subject, but when the high school quarterback wins the homecoming game, he gets a scholarship to a great college to play football and he goes and makes everybody proud, right?

So, back on the subject, when the Catholic kid who’s pretty good-looking and so smart that his parents fear he might be ‘a little bit savant’ graduates with a 4.0, no interest in girls (he was early for ever other milestone, maybe he’s just a little late for this one?), and a head full of chapter and verse, he goes and becomes a priest and makes everybody proud, right?

Because that’s what he’s supposed to do, right?

Right?

Well, hell, nobody stopped you.

Not even Jesus.

And you gave him three tries.

Oh well, you thought. It’s a living. Wasn’t like God was a hard guy to work for; the benefits were primo.

*********************

How long will mockers delight in mockery
and fools hate knowledge?
--Proverbs 1:22

*********************
JONATHON MASSEY’S POV


my sweet Lord

The only difference between psychiatry and the priesthood is several tax brackets and ego. That’s what you’d decided after spending several Sundays watching Father Dick at work. His parishioners put as much of their faith in him as your patients did in you, and he seemed to feel just as obligated to ease their suffering. It was a subject that always seemed to wind its way into your conversations with him from your very first date to early that morning when you’d come home from Daniel’s to find him reading in bed, waiting for you, unable to sleep until you debriefed him on what he’d missed. It was the thing about Father Dick that you found so endearing.

Plus, he was just so…tall, dark, and…pious.

You didn’t go into too much detail when explaining that you were going to be dropping by the church that day, and when he pressed you a little because you were being more mysterious than usual, you said, “Press a little harder…right there…no, wait…yeah, right there.”

He stirred more milk into his coffee as the two of you sat in at your kitchen table and then looked up at you through his eyelashes in that smoldering, righteous way he does, “You’re an absolute moron, you know that?”

“Jesus loved the morons,” you told him.

“Mormons,” he corrected you, “Mormons.”

“Damn, why do I always screw that up?”

“I’ll refer to you my earlier declaration.”

Father Dick’s hands, the way they wrap around his coffee cup…they’re so pedestrian; there’s just something so Habitat for Humanity about him…makes you want to pick up a nail gun and fasten him to your wall…like pop art…

Shake it off.

“Sometimes I get the feeling that you don’t have a very high opinion of my moral character,” you said.

He stood up, put his mug in your sink and you followed him, leaning against him when he turned around because you knew he was getting ready to leave. He was taller than you by exactly the right number of inches you’d always dreamed about, and before he kissed you, before his he-man fingers were stuck in your blond hair, he told you, “Sometimes I just want to use my rod and my staff to comfort you.”

“I don’t have a problem with that.”

He laughed, hugged you and warned you about playing Jesus that day, “Things didn’t turn out so well for him right away, Jon. You need to remember that, perhaps recalibrate your expectations.”

“I know,” you told him, “Centuries and centuries before he could just kick back and ride around on dashboards. Blah, blah blah.” And after he kissed you good-bye, you told him, “And I hate it when you talk to me like that, when you get all serious. You remind me of my father.”

“Who art in heaven?” And you were ready to fire back at him (because when isn’t your gun loaded?) when he turned around in the doorway, grabbed you, kissed you and said, “Be quiet. You’re so hot when your mouth’s shut.”

“Mmm mmm mmmm, mmm, mmm. Mm. Mmm, mm,” you told him as he walked out the door.

“That’s better. See if you can find some duct tape for later. Then we’ll really have some fun.”

“MMM, MMM MM!”

And he waved good-bye.

*********************

 
Then the Lord said, "If they do not believe you or pay attention to the first miraculous sign, they may believe the second.”
--Exodus 4:8

*********************


one toke over the line, sweet Jesus

But that particular Thursday morning you were sitting in the back row of Father Dick’s church, in the very same pew you were sitting in the first time you saw him--the day you met him a few months prior. The circumstances had been rather strange…

It was a freezing cold January day when you got a call from a colleague requesting a consult on a case at Mt. Sinai, a female college student on the psych ward who wasn’t sick enough to stay on the ward, but not quite stable enough to be mainstreamed back into the general population. You listened as the attending physician gave you the particulars—that she’d been taken to an exorcist at age twelve, her parents devout Christians who believed that everyone was born with a little of the devil in them, “Might as well get it out while she’s young,” as if it was a stain on a shirt, as if you could, ‘Shout it Out!’® She needed someone who would work with her outside of the psych ward, who would help her re-assimilate into life void of the internal terror she’d been dragging around. You were always the one who got these phone calls because you were known for your unique brand of shock therapy—the kind that didn’t plug into a wall. You were a bit of a maverick amongst your peers, but a very rich one, so in your profession, that essentially made you a genius. So you took the case, met the girl, and then started calling around the city, trying to find a Catholic church that would be amenable to helping you re-acclimate this girl, and most of them hung up on you. When you finally got Father Dick on the phone, he listened to everything you had to say, and then said, “Am I on the radio or something?”

“No, I’m serious. I’m really a psychiatrist. Look me up. I’m legit.”

“If I agree, do I win a million dollars?”

“No.”

“Damn.”

“Is that a yes or a no?” You were about to give up; this was ridiculous.

“It’s a maybe.”

“A maybe?”

“Tell you what,” he said, “You come to church this Sunday—without the girl—and we’ll talk after my sermon. If I think you’re legit and/or you give me a million dollars, it’s a deal.”

“There is no million dollars. Period.”

“See you Sunday, Dr--?”

“Massey. Jon Massey.”

“See you Sunday, Trapper John. I’ll be the one in the robe.”

And he hung up.

No one had called you ‘Trapper John’ since you were twenty-five. And the fact that hearing your old nickname gave you an erection is really just immaterial at this juncture.

So at that point, girl or no girl, you just had to see this guy, so you made Daniel go with you so you wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb—(instead it was just two sore thumbs, but who’s counting?)—and Dan spent the entire time writing, he’s REALLY hot, all over his program and then, do you think he’s NAKED under that thing?, and you looked down at your program and kept staring at his name, Father Richard Donnelly, and started wondering what people called him, and then you knew what you were going to call him, and then you knew he had to be the right one to help you. Because that’s the way the Lord works, sometimes he just stops dicking around and gives you a sign…named Dick.

*********************

The carpenter measures with a line and makes an outline with a marker; he roughs it out with chisels and marks it with compasses. He shapes it in the form of man, of man in all his glory…
--Isaiah 44:13

*********************


Jeremiah was a bullfrog
was a good friend of mine

After Justin left to return to Western Pennsylvania Virginia, you made a concerted effort to keep Daniel busy, and since your lay-of-late had a standing obligation on Saturday nights and Sunday mornings, Daniel would often accompany you to Father Dick’s services because, quite frankly, they were more entertaining than most Broadway shows. Like the Sunday when Dick’s sermon was going to focus on the prophet Jeremiah, and the choir was singing Joy to the World and no one thought it the least bit odd that Three Dog Night’s lyrics couldn’t be found in their hymnal.

Didn’t really matter…everybody knew them.

And when the offering plates were being distributed throughout the congregation, no one found it distasteful when Father Dick encouraged them to open their wallets by announcing, “Come on, everybody. I bring you tithings of great joy!”

“I don’t know what to make of him,” Daniel told you after one Sunday service, “I can’t decide if he’s brilliant or completely insane.”

“Me neither,” you told him, “I keep thinking I’m going to see something about him on the National Geographic channel, like maybe he’s the first human to be hatched in a Cuckoo bird’s nest.”

“Oh how sad,” Daniel said with his sympathetic hand on his shoulder, “He’s a mutant Cuckoo bird; he can’t fly.”

“I think that’s why he works for Jesus, so someday he’ll get some wings.”

……

The wind blew between you as you waited; it was early March. You tucked your head and zipped up your coat. It was taking longer than usual for Father Dick to reappear, perhaps he’d been held up by a chatty church member or was healing someone or something. You stuck your hands in your coat pockets to keep warm, and then you were talking again, filling the space between you, “I mean, last night after the service, he was working on a sermon in my office, so I left him alone—"

“That was nice of you.”

“But it drove me nuts because he was sitting in there on my loveseat in jeans and a flannel shirt with a pad on his lap—"

“What’s it with you and the flannel lately?”

“I don’t know. I hate flannel, absolutely hate it, until he puts it on, and so he’s downstairs in my study, wearing flannel, working on a sermon about Jesus and you wanna know what I’m doing?”

“What?”

“I’m upstairs on my bed masturbating with the Sears catalog.”

“Oh, please. Everybody slums with the Sears catalog when they can’t find something better,” Daniel told you, rolling his eyes.

“No, stupid. I wasn’t looking at the underwear models. I was jacking off to electric screwdrivers.”

“Wall mounted or portable?”

“Thank you for mocking for trauma.”

“Anytime.”

“Been able to walk through a museum without fondling yourself yet?” you asked him.

“Fuck y-- Oh, look, here comes your Homo Improvement.”

Maybe he was your savior after all.

*********************

Oh Lord, I love the habitation of your house.
--Psalms 26:8

*********************


where does the answer lie?

Before you met Father Dick, your impression of organized religion, and Christianity in particular, was that it was just one never-ending book tour by the world’s most clandestine authors. You bought a copy of the bible once, a really nice expensive one, and left it open on your coffee table for a year waiting for God to autograph it. He didn’t. When you asked Father Dick why God never showed up, he looked at you, deeply concerned about your relationship with the Lord, and said, “Jon, God can’t come to someone’s house by himself. The world we live in today, terrorism and all that. He can’t take that kind of a risk.”

“Good point. I didn’t think about that.”

“That’s why you have to come to church.”

“Because it’s a safe house?”

“Exactly.”

“So if I bring my bible on Sunday, God will sign it?”

“Absolutely, but only when you’re praying with your eyes closed and only with invisible ink.”

Father Dick always has an answer for everything.

……

The acoustics in Father Dick’s church are impressive, and as you sat there that Thursday morning, you could hear Nate and Sam talking at the piano, Daniel and Richard conferring at the podium, and the occasional conversations of parishioners who happened by during the course of the day for reasons that parishioners do. But when Nate started to play—well, you’d heard plenty of music in that church before—but when he started to play—it was Yesterday by The Beatles, you looked up from your scratch pad because your soul had awakened. The entire building was reverberating.

Your eyes were fixed on Nate as he got familiar with the piano, as you thought about what this was going to be like when Sarah was accompanying him. Your phone rang, buzzing in your pocket, a necessary but unwelcome interruption.

*********************

In the time of Herod king of Judea there was a priest named Zechariah…
--Luke 1:5

*********************
ZEEK ZIRROLLI’S POV


he shoot Coca Cola

Stitch called you Thursday morning in a tizzy about all the loot Lewis had found when he’d tried to walk Alan’s route; there was panic in his voice as he explained to you that every time Lewis went back, there was more stuff than the time before. It took you a while to calm him down, to remember what it was like to deal with him and his very narrow perspective of the world and his hair-trigger nerves when everything didn’t go exactly right. You promised him you’d meet him at the usual place in about an hour; he’d have someone looking for you, someone who would start the game of telephone once you were spotted to inform Stitch that he should come up.

In the meantime and per the instructions Jon had given you—because God forbid you start your day without someone bossing you around--you were smoking on Dan’s front steps when the delivery truck from Contemporary Furniture.com stopped right in front of you. The driver practically sprung out of the truck, sauntering up to you with a clipboard and a very fake smile on his face, “You Daniel Cartwright?”

“God, I hope not,” you said. He didn’t look very amused, rather like someone needed to sign off for his delivery in the next ten seconds or his head was going to pop off of his shoulders like a zit or something. “You were supposed to be here before noon,” you told him.

“Running late,” he chirped. “Traffic, the city, you know.”

“How many cups of coffee have you had, man?”

“Way too many.”

“No shit, man. No. Shit. Hang on one second for me. Just chill or something. You look like your brain’s about to explode.” You called Jon as you’d been instructed, “It’s here.”

“Well, they’re not. Proceed with Plan B.”

“This is fun; I haven’t done all of this convert stuff since I was six.”

“Covert.”

“Huh?”

“Covert. Call me back if there’s a problem.”

When you hung up, the driver was still working his artificial smile. He’d stopped bouncing in his shoes, but you could tell he was forcing himself to hold still. “I need you to wait for the doctor,” you told him.

“I can’t do that. I’m already late. I have other deliveries to make—"

“Here’s something for your trouble.”

He stared at the hundred dollar bill you gave him, then at you again, and then asked, “How long?”

“Half an hour, probably not even that.”

“No problem.”

“Here’s my cell number,” you told him. “If he’s not here in thirty minutes, call me. Otherwise, it’s been nice knowing you.”

And then you were gone, the last twelve hours forgotten, your mind focused on Stitch and the other things you needed to take care of that day.

*********************

 
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
--Matthew 28:19

*********************
FATHER DICK’S POV


he’s got the whole world in his hands

By that Thursday morning, you’d known Jonathon and Daniel for about three months and the only people you knew who were more inseparable than those two were the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. It certainly didn’t seem fair to you that you always had to be the Holy Ghost when the three of you hung out, but Jonathon promised you that one day he’d convince Daniel that he wasn’t God and you could have a turn. Yeah, right, you thought, when hell freezes over.

With the exception of the reason you met Jon, the girl who needed (she thought) to be delivered from demons, the two of you stayed in your own vocational corners, your liaisons happening after hours for obvious reasons. But that Thursday morning, he was setting up shop in your office and being very tight lipped about it. But you were a man of faith, and your faith told you to believe in him and while you were at it, could you please get him a Diet Coke from the drink machine, “Because I’d get it myself, but they’re going to be here any minute.”

You really wanted to know what he was up to because whatever it was Daniel was in on it, too, because you can always tell with those two, so you told Jon, sitting in the pew in front of him, backwards, facing him as you handed him his soda, “You’re making me feel left out.”

He was sketching on a steno pad in his lap, and he didn’t even look up, “Don’t pout; it makes me want to kiss you.”

……

“Fine, don’t tell me,” you told him, “Just be careful on that dashboard today; you are in New York City, after all.”

*********************

Then the Lord called Samuel. Samuel answered, "Here I am."
--1 Samuel 3:4

*********************
NATE ROCKFORD’S POV


hey,
won’t ya play
another somebody
done somebody wrong song?

That Thursday morning, you were forging a nice relationship with Sam as the two of you sat at the piano going over music for the funeral, and when you saw Brian and Justin walking down the aisle of the church, you smiled and waived. In all the years you’d known Brian, you’d never seen him look so fatigued.

And then Brian was moving away from Justin and Daniel, coming over to talk to you and it was nice because he was sitting beside you on the bench just like he did during his impromptu honeymoon.

“You okay?” you asked him.

“Yeah.”

He didn’t look okay to you. “You sure? You look like you don’t feel well.”

“I’m just tired,” he told you, and then he picked up the sheet music in front of you and started flipping through it, “Why’d you bring sheet music? You don’t need it.”

“Lyrics. Sarah needs it sometimes. Just habit I guess.” You began to play Yesterday again, and Brian sat your sheet music back in front of you and just watched you, and Sam came back over and you began to regale him with tales of Brian and Justin’s reception, and the three of you were laughing when Brian suddenly put his hand on top of yours to stop you from playing. You looked at him to see why he’d stopped you, but his eyes were fixed far across the sanctuary at Justin whose demeanor had done a complete one eighty since he’d walked in five minutes prior. Something was clearly amiss.

“Excuse me for a minute,” Brian said, and Sam leaned on the piano as he walked away and asked you, “What’s going on?”

You shrugged your shoulders, “I have no idea.”

You thought it none of your business, so you started playing again, but you were watching out of the corner of your eye: the three of them talking, Justin becoming agitated and even more so when Brian walked over, and when Brian got there, Daniel walking away.

And then Sam offering a running commentary, not as himself, but rather, as Howard Cosell: “Ladies and Gentlemen…this is an awesome spectacle…”

“Cut that out,” you told him, elbowing him in the ribs, but he continued anyway.

“A sight to behold…a match for the ages…sparks flying…if you will…

“between the often underestimated…

“Justin Taylor and his rival…

“the illustrious…Brime Kinney.”

“I didn’t know gay people fought like other married people,” you told him. “I mean, that’s cool. Fair is fair.”

“Who will be victorious? Will it go down to the wire? Who will be the…

“last...

“homosexual…

“standing?”

“I”ll bet you drive your wife up a wall, Sam.”

Justin had always struck you as quite a headstrong young man, but you hadn’t even seen he and Brian go head to head…so to speak.

“Somebody’s not getting laid tonight,” Sam whispered to you.

“Yeah, I know, but how do you know which one?"

*********************

There came a man who was sent from God; his name was John.
--John 1:6

*********************
JONATHON MASSEY’S POV


ready to go

Sometimes you forget how different a fifty-minute hour on a couch and the real world can be, and you were about to be fiercely reminded. Your plan for the day seemed to be written in that infamous invisible ink Father Dick raves about because what should have been the first act went from zero to sixty in about three seconds with Brian walking so damn fast down that church aisle and practically willing you out of your seat and into a cab. And when the cab door shut and the only sound was the obnoxious talk radio squawking from the front seat, you could practically hear the waves of emotion crashing against the man sitting beside you like it was high tide at the Hoover Dam. His hand was pressed flat on the seat next to him as if he were holding himself still, the bones of his hand a grounding round for the rest of him.

A lesser doctor might have prescribed something at that moment.

Maybe a force field.

In pill form.

For himself.

You said nothing, just held on while the cabbie swerved through traffic, looking over at Brian every few seconds. He never moved; he just stared out the window as if he was too angry to blink.

Upon arrival at Daniel’s, Brian paid the driver, signed for the chair from the happiest delivery man you’d ever seen, and then watched you as you unlocked Daniel’s front door. He was ready.

He unboxed the chair in the foyer—quite handedly—and because the ottoman was shrink wrapped and sitting upside down on the chair, he relegated you to the top of the chair because the bottom was heavier, and well, that was a no brainer. (Your biggest muscle is between your ears, no shame in that.) And then you began, perhaps somewhat symbolically, to back up the stairs, step by step by step, and Brian’s head kept bobbing to the left and the right and the left and right like a metronome and finally you asked, “What are you doing?”

“Counting how many steps you have left.”

“Oh.”

“Two more.”

And then you were both on the landing, turning the tight corner, and you were backing into Daniel’s bedroom and finally sitting the damn thing down. “That thing is seriously heavy,” you offered.

“No shit.”

“You want to cut this shrink wrap—" you were asking him, but he wasn’t looking at you, he was looking at the existing chair with a perplexed expression on his face.

“This is the chair I ruined?” he asked you.

“Not the chair, the ottoman.”

So he stood over the ottoman for a few seconds, and then squatted down beside the ottoman for a few seconds, and then pointed to something on the ottoman, “This scuff mark? This black scuff mark? I did this?”

You had to lean over to be sure; you hadn’t actually seen the damage, “Looks like it. I mean, I don’t think that was there before.”

Brian stood up, his height something you had to keep getting used to, and sat in the ‘ruined’ chair to further observe the ‘ruined’ ottoman, “Justin replaced the entire piece because of a scuff mark?”

“That’s my understanding,” you answered, hoisting yourself up to sit on the end of Daniel’s bed because he was obviously not interested in continuing with the chair swap at the moment and it never hurts to rest the body after physical exertion.

……

And then Brian stopped looking at you, staring out the window instead, and the room got eerily quiet, so quiet that when your stomach growled, you both laughed. “Sorry, I guess I’m hungry.”

“Did Daniel ask him to replace the chair?” Brian asked you, his eyes on the window.

“No. He has this cutting edge substance called ‘upholstery cleaner;’ comes in real handy when you have a two-year-old running wild in your house.”

“I have a son; I well remember.”

“You do? I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, he lives in Canada.”

“You were married before?”

He busted out laughing, “God, no. My friend, Lindsay, she’s gay; she wanted a child.”

“Wow. Sorry about that; you sort of threw me for a loop there.”

“No problem. I get that about once a year.”

……

And with that, Brian stood up and began unraveling the plastic on the new chair, so you helped him, and when the switch was made, the dishonorable chair was banished to the studio and Daniel’s bedroom was restored to its former untouched glory devoid of all cardboard and packing materials, all with the swipe of a MasterCard, a hundred dollars in cash, and a little bit of sweat.

Brian thanked you for helping him and then followed you downstairs and back outside where the two of you stood on Daniel’s front steps and because things had started off a little differently than you planned, you were a little off kilter and relieved when he pulled out a pack of cigarettes, offering you one, which you took with no idea why because you hadn’t smoked one in forever.

When you bum a cigarette off a guy, a friend, whatever, it’s not like you’re obligated to stand there and smoke it in his presence, but both of you seemed rather fixed where you were, except that you were sitting on Daniel’s steps and Brian was pacing, but he kept passing back and forth in front of you, which gave you time to think.

Until he stopped.

You’d been looking at his shoes the whole time anyway, back and forth, back and forth, and then you saw his cigarette shoot toward the ground, he was going to step on it, to put it out, but then he realized what he was standing on—

……

And he bent down to pick it up—the cigarette—looking at it like he didn’t know what to do with it, his body posturing the way a small child’s does when he stops to examine a bug on a summer sidewalk and then he looked up at you, the same way he’d looked out the window upstairs, only this time from the other side—the outside trying to look in…

……

……

So you leaned to your left, extending your hand through the bars of Daniel’s railing, and looked at him, “Give it to me. I’ll take it.”

But you had to take the butt out of his fingers—practically, pry it—and extinguish both of them right where you were on Daniel’s steps, and he was still there hovering over that spot like he’d just been the last kid down in a game of freeze tag. And then his eyes moved to his fingers as if he wasn’t expecting to see them empty and then to your face as if he wasn’t expecting to see you there…

and then they rolled…

back into his head…

and he rolled…

or rather tipped…

back onto the sidewalk...

and you jumped up, “Shit!,” and ran behind him just in time to place your foot in the exact spot where his head would’ve smacked the cement.

*********************

Babylon will suddenly fall and be broken.
Wail over her!
Get balm for her pain;
perhaps she can be healed.
--Jeremiah 51:8

*********************


if I fall along the way,
pick me up and dust me off

You were taking his pulse when he came to and there was a yellow taxi cab waiting at the curb with its door open; the taxi driver, he’d seen you jump, apparently, seen you break Brian’s fall. He was out for less than two minutes, and when he began to wake up, he squeezed your hand hard, his eyes barely open, “Sunshine.”

“Nope, partly cloudy, maybe later,” you said as he groaned, and then you told him, “You fainted, Brian; Justin’s at the church, remember?”

He opened his eyes and looked at you, like he was trying to place who you were. “At the church,” he repeated.

“Does your head hurt? Or your neck?” you asked him.

“No.”

“When was the last time you ate?”

He let go of your hand and tried to sit up, “Long time ago.” And then he turned and looked at Daniel’s front door and then back at you, “The chair. We moved it.”

“We did. We’re done. Let’s go eat lunch. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Between you and the railing, Brian eventually got steady on his feet, and the two of you got into the waiting cab. The cabbie pulled out into traffic, and then asked you, “Where to?”

“Anywhere,” you told him. “Anywhere but here.”

*********************

 
where he had turned the water into wine…
--John 2:9

*********************


suddenly, I'm not half the man I used to be

“What happened?” Brian asked you as soon as the cab turned the corner.

“You were trying to put your cigarette out and you fainted.” He seemed clueless about the catalyst, so you decided to let it go until he seemed more like his usual self. “Have you fainted before?” you asked him.

“No,” he said, his voice still sounding rough, dry. “Not that I know of.” He coughed, tried to clear his throat.

“Maybe you just need to eat.”

The taxi driver stopped in front of a restaurant, turned around and looked you, “This okay?”

“It’s fine,” you told him, and it wasn’t until you’d paid him and both you and Brian had stepped inside that Brian told you, “This is where we ate last night.”

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t know. You want to go somewhere else?”

“Because it’s right around the corner.”

“We can leave if you want. I didn’t know.” (You and Father Dick had been otherwise occupied.)

But the staff had already recognized him, “Mr. Kinney, back so soon? Table for two?”

“Brian, we can go somewhere else,” you said again, but you were talking to his back because the hostess was leading him through the restaurant to a nice, private table in the back and when you sat down across from him, he said, “I don’t mind. The food’s excellent; the bar’s even better, and it’s not like I’m in New York every week.”

“Well, right. Good point. It’s fine with me.”

And then your faces disappeared behind your menus because you really were starving, and when you finally decided on what you were going to have and closed yours, his was already folded shut on the table, his hands clasped on top of it. “Ready to order?” he asked you.

He waved the waiter over to your table and instructed you to order first. Less than fifteen minutes earlier he’d been out cold, and now he was back to his old self again. You began to wonder if he was the miracle worker.

“I should call Justin; see if he wants anything,” he told you after the waiter had walked away, but there wasn’t much conviction in his voice and as you watched him…he never reached for his phone.

……

“Can I tell you a secret?” you asked.

Water arrived for both of you, and you were relieved that Brian wasn’t starting lunch with liquor. “Sure,” he said, his voice fragrant with disbelief, that you could know something he didn’t.

“In the six years Justin lived here, I never once saw him struggle to find lunch.”

“Is that so?” Brian asked, his eyebrows doing things that most people’s eyebrows can’t even dream of.

“In fact, and I’m sure you’re aware of this, he’s particularly talented at finding the free ones.”

Brian laughed a little and then a lot, and then asked, “And can I tell you a follow-up secret?”

“By all means.”

“That’s because I taught him everything he knows.”

……

You leaned back in your side of the booth, getting comfortable, the adrenaline spike beginning to fade, “Really? Everything? I find that hard to believe.” Brian seemed to find your dubiousness a bit naive so you clarified your position, “The age difference between you? You expect me to believe that a seventeen-year-old kid ends up with you without having a little charm of his own to begin with?”

Brian smiled, his fingers perched above the rim of his water glass, “I picked him up.”

“What? Out of a catalog?”

“I’m serious; I picked him up. He was just standing there leaning on a pole.”

“Just leaning against a pole?”

“Yep. And then I took him home and showed him mine.”

(You weren’t sure if you believed him; he was about as credible as Amelia was when she took cash out of your coat and when you questioned her about it--while her hand was still in your pocket--she’d just smile at you and say, “But I founded it.”)

……

“And was that was the first trip he’d ever taken to the North pole?” you inquired.

“Chartered? Yes.”

“I don’t suppose you have any pictures?”

“They didn’t make cameras back then,” he told you. “It was a long time ago,” he said, almost wistfully. (Perhaps he’d hit his head harder than you thought…)

“Well, like they say, the rest is history right?”

……

Brian slid his glass to the edge of the table because it was empty and because he saw the waiter coming his way and then looked at you, the smile and nostalgic bravado gone from his face and something else settling in—an emotional fatigue, the same one you’d seen when he was sitting in Daniel’s soon-to-be-retired chair staring out the window less than an hour before,

“No…”

And he stopped, like he didn’t want to finish his sentence, and he stared at the television playing in the bar for a few seconds and you did, too, following his gaze out of habit and the waiter refilled your glasses and walked away, and then Brian seemed more present again, leaning back in the booth, facing you again, his hand rubbing the back of his head, acknowledging for the first time that something had happened to him—only you weren’t exactly sure if he was acknowledging the recent bump on his head tied to his bouncing reality check or if he was acknowledging something much bigger, something he couldn’t describe because it…owned him?

“… the rest isn’t history…”

Because it defined him.

He brought his hand in front of his face again, staring at his fingernails and then spread it on the table, steeling himself as his gaze slid down his arm, over his fingers and officially back to you so he could he finish his thought,

“It’s just that it’s supposed to be.”

……

You didn’t say anything at first, but then you felt like he wanted you to; you felt like he was stuck somewhere, and then all of a sudden you felt really intimidated by this man—by his stature, by the sheer weight of his persona, by that fact that even though he was clearly struggling, he never once abdicated his invisible throne, but you said something anyway because everyone knows that the walls people construct around themselves—well, even if you build your mansion with bricks, you know someone or something will be there sooner or later to huff and puff and blow your house down.

Because if you didn’t believe that, well, you would’ve gone with straw from the get go.

“Sometimes history repeats itself,” you offered.”

He rolled his eyes at the concept, not at you, his meaning very clear: Tell me something I don’t know.

But you weren’t finished, “But sometimes it’s not about repetition; it’s about …"

You stopped for a second trying to formulate your thoughts because he was really listening to you—attentively—and it caught you off guard.

“It’s about what?” he prodded you.

……

You started again, “You know how you’ll be cleaning out your closet one day and come across an old album you forgot you had—"

“Abbey Road..”

“Sure, perfect, and you’re so psyched you pull it out and stare at it for a while and then decide to play it, but when you find the record player, dust it off, and put the needle on the record, you can’t enjoy it like you used to because—"

“It skips.”

“Exactly.” Brian seemed to like the analogy, and you weren’t surprised because he was an ad man, comparison was his business, so you kept going, “So then you have to decide: are you going to just go buy the CD or are you going to get the record fixed, have the scratch repaired?”

“Buy the CD; the record will never sound like it used to even if they can fix it.”

“Right, of course; that’s the logical thing to do. And after you do that, what happens to the record? Do you throw it away?”

He shook his head, “No, I couldn’t throw away something like that away. Never.”

“Why not? You don’t need it anymore. You got what you wanted—the pleasure of listening to The Beatles.”

“Because it means something to me.”

“More than the music?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, tell me what it means then, if it means more than the music.”

……

……

He was right there with you, and you were surprised to see him (to feel him) so accessible; he had that album in his hands; he could see it, and he wasn’t going to put it down.

“I don’t know,” he began and then stopped himself and started again, “I just can’t explain it.”

……

……

“Okay, well, how would you feel if I took it away from you right now?”

He waited about five seconds because his demeanor was changing, his fingers that had been laced together on the table tightened up, “Furious.”

“Furious?”

“Yeah.”

“So you don’t know why it’s important to you but you can’t let it go?”

……

He looked up at you, anger and fear simultaneously mapping his face, “I’m going to break it.”

“You want to destroy it?” Fear of the anger. “It means something to you, but you want to destroy it?”

“I don’t want to…”

“Just because someone wants to take it away?”

“I don’t want to,” he continued as if every word was agony, “But that’s what I’m going to do.”

……

In the minute that followed, Brian pulled the salt shaker in front of him and fiddled with it, focusing on it and instead of you; his eye contact quota apparently spent; he couldn’t look at you. “Can you stop yourself?” you asked him, your voice becoming quieter; he felt so fragile to you at that moment.

“No.”

……

“Brian, is this why you left Justin at the hotel last night? Because you felt like this?”

He nodded, almost in shame, but then laughed like he was remembering something, “I left because he’s killing me…just like he said he would.”

“How so?”

“With kindness,” he said, staring off into space as if he no longer needed you to keep up your half of the conversation.

And then you understood, “His own special recipe—seven herbs and spices?”

“It’s not like I don’t deserve it,” Brian said, “He learned it from me.”

*********************

 
Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial…
--James 1:12

*********************


the light on the dark side of me

And then he was silent. The appetizers came, and you asked the waiter to bring a pitcher of water because you’d never seen anyone drink as much water in one sitting as Brian was; clearly, the man was on empty. There was no rhyme or reason to what you’d ordered—a little of this, a little of that—pot stickers, stuffed mushrooms, some onion thing, bruschetta—and Brian ate rather sporadically at first because he’d started up again. Whatever was inside him trying to get out—it reminded you of the first car you ever owned, a 1984 Chevette (it was the last year they made them), how whether or not you were going to get where you were going on any given day was a matter of chance; some days the engine would hum and others it would sputter and spit and sigh, leaving you stranded in your driveway. And that was Brian, sputtering sometimes and other times starting to sail, maybe lunch was the fuel he needed?

And most of the time he was talking you were looking at him or trying to anyway, but it was virtually pointless because he was looking all over the place; as if his eyes were chasing a house fly that only he could see…

“It’s just…Justin and I…

……

“My relationship with Justin, well, it kind of…

…..

“I think of it--I picture it--like the last arrow Cupid shot on some Valentine’s Day or something. I mean, he was clearly drunk, his aim was severely compromised, and maybe he was a little pissed off or something. Maybe the arrow before ours, mine, you know, maybe the recipient was ungrateful, so he was pissed off and shot one at me.”

“You think Cupid has road rage or something?”

“Maybe.”

“So you think Cupid shot you in the ass with an arrow and that’s why you and Justin are together, married?” you asked him.

“No, of course not. He shot me in the dick.”

You leaned in put your hand on Brian’s face, “Hold still for a minute.”

“Why?”

“Making sure your pupils are the same size.”

“Are they?” he asked.

“Unbelievably, yes. Please continue.”

And then the joking was over, “I just mean that our relationship has always been like a moving target; seems like it never stands still for even a couple of days.”

“Well, it’s not boring then.”

“No,” he agreed, “It’s never boring.”

……

But there were things you wanted to know from Brian, things you didn’t understand, so you tried to steer the conversation a little, “You call it a ‘moving target,’ and I’m wondering why you say that? I would think it was a target simply because you were so much older than him. I can’t imagine everybody was okay with that.”

“You’re right, most people weren’t okay with that, including me.”

“So…”

“Didn’t really matter; Justin gets what he wants.”

“Hmm.”

“He’s like a boomerang. The harder you push him away, the more you push him away, the faster he comes back,” Brian said, his voice laced with pride.

“Okay…so he’s tenacious.”

Brian laughed at you, “In overdrive.”

“Stubborn?”

“We have a winner.”

“Determined.”

“You’re on a roll.”

“And this is how he lives his life?”

……

“It’s how he survived,” Brian said, the smile on his face evening out.

……

“And it’s how he loves you,” you said.

And Brian said nothing, just let his water glass hang precariously from his fingers as he stared off into space again; you felt as if he might drop it at any moment, let it shatter without blinking an eye, and it was everything you could do not to just take it from him and sit it down, but you didn’t. You just watched him, trying to figure out what was going on, what had changed all of a sudden. And then even though he wasn’t looking at you, even though he was testing you to see if you’d let him fall again, you decided to say what you were thinking because you could feel it, because he’d convinced you, because you believed it,

“And it’s how you survived, isn’t it?”

*********************

When anyone is guilty in any of these ways, he must confess…
--Leviticus 5:5

*********************


put the needle on the record,
put the needle on the record,
put the needle on the record,
when the drum beat goes like this

And when he finally looked at you again, all that water he’d been drinking was abandoning him, welling up right in front of you, and he sat the glass down and covered it, his palm pressing flat, “It was,” he said, “But not anymore.”

You leaned forward and touched him, something you’d never do to a patient, but you couldn’t help yourself, wrapping your hand around his wrist, and he just kept staring at you like what do I do now?

You took a deep breath, “Brian, tell me what you think happened last night.” He shook his head like you were trying to highlight his weaknesses, exploit his bad behavior. “No, I mean, what do you remember?”

His eyebrows went up in relief. “That I wanted to fuck; I think. I mean, that’s what I usually want. Something wasn’t right, something weird was happening—"

“Something weird?”

“The target was moving again,” he explained, “So I left.”

“Okay.”

“I went to some bar, drank, and ended up at Daniel’s place, not sure—"

“You called Zeek; he was there.”

“Fuck. Now I’m going to have to give him a raise.”

“Probably.”

“The rest is mostly a blur. I went upstairs, obviously, and then I woke up in his living room.”

“Where did you think Justin was when you woke up this morning?”

“I knew he was close by; well, I thought he was.”

“But you knew you left him at the hotel last night?”

“Yeah,” he conceded. “There’s a gap there somewhere. Justin told me I made an ass out of myself, but he didn’t give me any details.”

“When you arrived—"

“Were you there when I got there?” he asked you.

“No. When you arrived, you were drunk, stumbling, and belligerent with Zeek and Daniel. You told Daniel that Justin wanted you to go home.”

“He did.”

“You ended up on the living room floor and eventually having what we call a ‘dissociative break.’”

“That doesn’t sound like a good thing.”

You told Brian what had happened, how he’d confused Alan and Justin, how what had happened to Alan became crossed with what he believed about Justin over a decade ago, how he was asking to see Justin before they ‘took him away.’ “Daniel called me, and Richard and I went to The Regency, got Justin, and brought him to Daniel’s because he wasn’t answering his cell or anything.”

“He was pissed.”

“When he was in the cab with us, when we told him what happened, he started shaking, Brian. I truly believe that if hadn’t been sitting in the middle, between Richard and myself, he would’ve jumped out of that taxi and run all the way to Daniel’s. He was terrified.”

“He was?”

“Yeah, he was.”

“It was my fault.”

“Funny, that’s what he said—all the way there.”

*********************

But I have raised you up for this very purpose, that I might show you my power and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.
--Exodus 9:16

*********************
FATHER DICK’S POV


put your hand in the hand of the man who stilled the water

That Thursday was the day you understood why you always had to be the Holy Ghost; God had a purpose for you—needing you to hover over both the old and the new, the Testaments in human form--because while Jon had left the church with Brian and taken his message to the streets, Daniel was left behind, confined to the walls that housed him, his words his only sword in the battle he was facing.
.
You felt like a spectator in a Roman coliseum, floating along the periphery of the church, making sure that no one escaped, and you hoped that wherever Jon was, he was having an easier time of it. Daniel was nothing if not steadfast and brave, but you kept your eye on him because God bless that man; he’d been through one hell of a week, and his luck wasn’t changing.

And you knew something that neither of your physician friends did, you knew that although John walked with Jesus, Daniel was stronger because he had only the gift of prophecy, only his faith to protect him; he would never meet the Messiah whose arrival he foretold, his only choice was to believe what God was telling him.

But you were watching him, and he had his game face on ninety percent of the time, so you figured he was hanging in there…

*********************

 
…troublemakers among David’s followers said, “Because they did not go out with us, we will not share with them the plunder we recovered…” David replied, “No, my brothers, you must not do that with what the Lord has given us. He has protected us and handed over to us the forces that came against us. Who will listen to what you say? The share of the man who stayed with the supplies is to be the same as that of him who went down to the battle. All will share alike.”
--1 Samuel 30 22:24

*********************
DANIEL CARTWRIGHT’S POV


by now you should've somehow
realized what you gotta do

You made your decision to take this course of action after you’d retired to your bedroom earlier that morning, trying to sleep after the night you’d had. You took a sleeping pill, hoping for just a few hours of sleep and were beginning to feel your body relax when the door to your bedroom popped open. At first, you thought you were imagining it because you were in that in between place and sometimes it doesn’t shut all the way, but when you didn’t move, it opened wide. So you stayed still in your bed, wondering what the fuck Justin was doing as he was practically asleep when you came upstairs.

You watched with one very sleepy eye as he walked over to your chair, flipped open his cell phone for light, and began to inspect the ottoman, his finger scratching at the mark Brian’s boot had made, and then your one eye opened wider as he sat down in the chair and very carefully flipped the ottoman over, sat it down, closed his phone and opened it again so the light would come back and on, and started reading the tag.

“Justin, what the hell are you doing?” you asked him.

“Jesus, you scared me. I thought you were asleep.”

“I almost was.” You didn’t even bother to sit up; you didn’t even have it in you at that point. “What are you doing?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“What are you doing?” you asked him for the third time.

“Getting the model number off of your chair.”

“Why?”

“So we can have it replaced.”

And he was upside down playing chair detective during this questioning, not looking at you, so finally you said, “Come here, please.”

He flipped the ottoman right side up repeating the model number to himself and then walked over to you, “What?”

“Sit down.” He sat on the edge of your bed as you turned on a lamp, “You don’t need to replace the chair.”

“It’s damaged; I want to replace it.”

You sighed, “I can clean it.”

“It’s black on white, Daniel. It’ll never come out. Trust me.”

You propped your head on your hand and reached for him, your hand resting on his forearm, “You drive me crazy when you get like this.”

“Get like what?”

“There’s a difference between protecting someone and denying them access to their own experiences, Justin.”

“Whatever.”

“No, not whatever. You got this way yesterday when it was time to watch the footage, turning yourself inside out because you didn’t want Harper to watch it.”

“I had a damn good reason, Daniel. She was hysterical when I got here yesterday; she was crying so hard, she couldn’t even breathe.”

“I know, but it’s okay to cry.”

“Not like that.” He shifted on your bed, fiddling with his phone, “I need to go back downstairs; Brian might wake up soon,” and then got up to leave.

“Yeah, and God forbid if he ‘wakes up’ Justin; the world might stop revolving or something.”

You couldn’t even provoke him as he stood in your doorway, “Sorry I woke you up. We’ll replace the chair. I’m going back downstairs.”

He was lying on both counts. There was no ‘we’ about it, and he didn’t go back downstairs. He went into his studio, his former studio, called and ordered the replacement to be delivered by lunchtime. You heard him rattling off the make and model, the color, your address, a credit card number, and finally, the name on the card:

“Brian A. Kinney.”

*********************

 
Then I heard a loud voice from the temple saying to the seven angels, "Go, pour out the seven bowls of God's wrath on the earth."
--Revelation 16:1

*********************


if I should choose to make it part of me
would surely strike me dead

To say that Justin was unhappy with you that afternoon was a bit of an understatement; he blamed you, though he didn’t have the guts to say it, for upsetting Brian, for purposely leaving your place before noon to fuck up the chair delivery, for exposing his early morning reparations. But you couldn’t really blame him because it was all true—every single bit of it. To be fair, it hadn’t come easily to you; Jonathon had to push you to summon Justin to the church knowing damn well he’d bring Brian with him, his emotional leash getting tighter and tighter.

“You’re allergic to deceit,” Jonathon had told you that morning, “And you’re just going to have to take a pill and get over it.” So you swallowed your emotions and did it, painful as it was.

The preparations for Alan’s funeral had to be finalized that day, so you’d called Justin there, telling him he needed to compose what he wanted to say, practice it, time it, and help get everything ready for tomorrow. He’d come willingly, and he should’ve been thanking you; you spared him the much less gentle wake up call he would’ve gotten from your cohort. But he wasn’t going to be thanking you anytime soon; he was still fuming as you sat beside him about seven pews from the front, his sneakers lodged in the hymnal holder, a steno pad in his left hand and a pen in his right, nursing a pregnant silence between you that you feared would only be broken by the birth of something bearing the mark of the beast.

Finally you spoke when Nate had stopped playing, the sanctuary quiet for the first time, “Is this the quiet violence you paint?”

“I’m not interested in having a conversation with you right now, Daniel.”

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’”

……

Richard walked by and smiled at you, and you smiled back.

“Justin, I think you’re making this a lot harder than it has to be—"

He turned then and snapped at you, “Why do you insist on lecturing me about something you know nothing about? You don’t know shit about me or what—"

“I wasn’t talking about you; I meant what you’re doing for Alan.”

……

……

He pulled out his cell phone, flipped it open, and then as his eyes went from cool, clear blue to a scalding red, “Can you just leave me alone, please?”

“Who are you calling?”

“None of your fucking business.”

“Well, good luck with it,” you told him as you got up, “Let me know if you need any help and put your feet down; this isn’t your fucking living room.”

*********************

HARPER COLLIN’S POV


she’s moving out in all directions

You’d never hear your cell phone ring that day because at that very moment your name was being broadcast over every loud speaker in Macy’s:

"Attention Macy’s customers: Would a customer by the name of ‘Ms. Harper Collin’s’ please go to the nearest telephone and dial ‘zero’ for security? I repeat, Ms. Harper Collins, please …"

“Oh my god, they found her!” you screamed, running so fast you slammed into the jewelry counter, your bags, purse (and all of its contents) flying everywhere as you demanded the phone from the sales girl, “Please, give me the phone! Dial zero!”

”Security.”

“This is Harper Collins.” Deep breath. “You just paged me.” Deep breath. “Please tell me you have my daughter.”

”We have an Amelia Jocelyn Harper-Collins here, yes.” You could hear Amelia in the background, “I’m ‘upposed to talk to my Mommy now.” And then the transfer of the phone, “Here you go; she’s on the phone.”

“Amelia?”

”Mommy, you’re ‘upposed to come get me right now.”

“I’m coming right now. I’ll be right there, Amelia. Right there.”

”Yeah, I got losted by the accident.”

“I know, sweetie. It’s okay. I’m coming right now. Where’s security?” you asked the sales girl who’d just helped Sarah pick up all of your stuff, except for one of your tampons that landed in the sales girl’s coffee—total loss.

“In the basement.”

“Oh my god, thank you! Thank you so much!” And you and Sarah were off again.

The message Justin left on your cell, you wouldn’t listen to it for hours:

”Harper, it’s me. I’m at the church…with Sam and Daniel and everybody.

“I’m supposed to write what I want to say at the funeral tomorrow…but I…I don’t know, I guess I’m just not comfortable doing that until I’ve talked to you first. I mean, I don’t even know what you’re going to say.

“I guess, I…I don’t even know where to start. Can you call me when you get this?

“I hope you’re having fun with Sarah; I meant to warn you about the gnomes. Don’t let her give you any. I’ll explain later…when you call me, okay? Bye.”

*********************

But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.
--Matthew 18:6

*********************


this little piggy went to market

That Thursday was Amelia’s first trip to a department store; up until that day, your daughter’s concept of shopping for clothes was sitting in your lap in front a computer, clicking on some pictures, and then seeing a package arrive on Daniel’s doorstep a few days later; she had no concept of the original definition of the word ‘browsing,’ no idea that that’s what she’d been doing in the children’s department when she got separated from you and Sarah. And it had happened in the blink of an eye; you thought she was with Sarah; Sarah thought she was with you, and according to Security, Amelia thought she’d just help herself to some Hello Kitty jewelry.

Not only was she lost, she was shoplifting.

“Well, I saw her first,” one of the security guards told you after you’d arrived in the basement, found their office, and finally found her. Amelia jumped out of his lap and ran to you and once again, you dropped everything you were carrying, this time just to bend down and hug her and then to sit on the floor and cry.

“It’s okay, Mommy,” she told you, “You founded me.”

“You scared me to death, ‘Melia. You have to stay with me.”

She put her hands on your face, “I knowed that but I founded a pretty dress.”

“You have to take Mommy to the pretty dress; you can’t go by yourself. Never, ever.”

“Yeah, I knowed that. I gotted in trouble,” she told you.

The security guard, his badge read ‘Morris,’ said he saw her on one of the cameras, “She was just filling that little purse she’s carrying with all these bracelets; so, I called up there, and I told Shelley, I said, ‘You got a pint-size princess in the Hello Kitty section, and she’s cleaning you out.’”

They had the whole thing on tape, and before Morris let you watch it, he told you, “You know, we’re trained to watch out for these very complex shoplifting schemes people have these days, so for a while we thought she was part of the real deal. You know, the distraction part of the plot.” And then he pushed play…

And you got to watch your daughter wandering around the child-size jewelry display with her purse dangling from her arm just like yours does, got to watch her pick each pink bracelet up, brand it ‘so ‘squisite’, and then deposit it in her purse like she’d been shoplifting since the day she was born. And then the sales girl, Shelley, approached her, “May I help you?”

“No.” Amelia walked away from her a little bit and kept choosing, complimenting, and confiscating. “I’m ‘upposed to be shopping right now.”

“What’s your name?”

“AmeliaJocelynHarper-Collins.”

“Are you here with your Mommy, Amelia?”

“Yeah, ‘cause my Daddy was under the covers ‘cause that’s where his pemis is.”

“Oh.”

You stopped Morris right then, “You’re giving me this tape right? I have to have it to blackmail her father one day.”

He laughed, “Yeah, you can have it. We’re not gonna press charges.” And the tape continued…

“Amelia, we need to put these bracelets back and go find your mommy. I think you got separated from her; she’s probably very worried right now.”

“I’m ‘upposed to buy so many bacelets,” Amelia told her, clearly not interested in finding you or in putting them back.

“Do you have any money?”

Amelia turned her little purse upside down, dumping everything she’d shoplifted onto the floor and then bent down and picked something up and gave it to Shelley, “I have this money.”

”Sweetie, this is an ice cube… with a fly in it—"

“He’s just betend.”

“Okay, but this isn’t money.”

“’Cause it’s plastic in the fweezer like mommy.”

“Plastic in the freezer like mommy?”

“The fly, he won’t come out; he just lives there ‘cause I don’t why.”

Shelley started to pick up all the bracelets littering the floor and put them back in the display bin, encouraging Amelia to help, and you were relieved beyond words to see that Amelia did, and then Shelley let her pick out one bracelet for being such a good helper and made sure her ice cube was back in her little purse and said, ”Amelia, does your mommy keep her credit cards in the freezer?”

“Yeah, ‘cause it’s only for ‘portant.”

“Right. Why don’t we go find Mommy and tell her what a big helper you were?”

“Yeah, I gotted all the bacelets off the floor.”

“What’s your mommy’s name, Amelia?”

“Harper Collins.”

“Say it again?”

“Harper Collins.”

“Are you sure, sweetie? That’s a publisher…”

You apologized to Morris as he gave you the tape, and then you, Sarah, and Amelia went upstairs to thank Shelley, who said that it was the best part of her day because, “No one’s ever tried to buy anything with an fake ice cube before, and I met somebody who’s actually named Harper Collins! I mean, how crazy is that?”

“How much is the bracelet?” you asked her.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” she told you.

“No, I want Amelia to learn that money doesn’t bob up and down in grape juice.”

So Shelley played along, “Three ninety-five.”

So you gave Amelia four dollars and showed her how to put the bracelet on the counter, and when Shelley said, “That’ll be three ninety-five,” you nudged your daughter, “Give her your money, ‘Melia.”

“No.”

“If you want the bracelet, then you have to give her the money. That’s how you buy things.”

But by then Amelia had lost all interest in the bracelet and wanted the cash, so Sarah jumped in and said, “No problem. Amelia, give Shelley the bracelet.” And Amelia did. “Now, Shelley, give Amelia her money back.” And Shelley handed Amelia the four dollars that Harper had just slipped her.

“Great job, Amelia,” Sarah told her. “You just learned the art of the return.”

……

You thought Amelia had dropped her money on the floor because the next thing you knew, she was squatting down looking for something, and when you held out your hand and said, “Come on, ‘Melia, tell Shelley good-bye. It’s time to go.” But she wouldn’t budge, so you bent down to pick her up, “Come on; let’s go. It’s time for lunch.”

“It’s time for the poop,” she whispered to you.

And so for the third time in the last hour, you dropped everything again, this time because you were grabbing Amelia and running toward the direction Shelley pointed you in as fast as you could. “This is why I hate shopping,” you proclaimed as you ran into the ladies room with Amelia in your arms, scoring a touchdown with seconds to spare. “It sucks, you know that?”

“Yeah, ‘cause we’re ‘upposed to do it on the line.”

“You’re exactly right, ‘Melia,” you told her and then you kissed her on the forehead, “You’re the smartest, prettiest, most amazing little girl in the whole world.”

“Yeah, I already knowed that.”

……

And when hands were washed and hair was fixed and the two of you were nice and calm and ready to go find Sarah and have some lunch, you took Amelia’s hand (firmly) and told her, “I’m having a really good time with Sarah today, but we probably won’t do this shopping thing again for awhile.”

“Yeah, ‘cause you’re ‘upposed to bring my practice potty and you forgotted it.”

“That’s your father’s fault; he didn’t put it by the front door.”

And that was the one thing that day that Amelia actually bought.

*********************

Then an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. When Zechariah saw him, he was startled and was gripped with fear. But the angel said to him: "Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard.”
--Luke 1:13

*********************
ZEEK ZIRROLLI’S POV


he got feet down below his knees
hold you in his armchair
you can feel his disease

Lewis was waiting for you in the usual spot, a spot you’d met Alan in plenty of times and it bothered you to see Lewis standing there instead of him, but he disappeared quickly and within five minutes, Stitch had taken his place.

You’d forgotten what a completely different man Stitch is above ground, how threatening he looks in his filthy camouflage clothes, his dark sunglasses he never takes off, a gray knit cap pulled down over his hair. You’d never believe he was a man who took care of so many when you saw him on the sidewalk; he looked too paranoid to cross the street, wouldn’t even look at you when he was talking to you.

“Tell me what the problem is,” you said. So he began again, like earlier, the hysteria in his voice, and it was annoying you, so you stopped him. “Okay, okay, stop. Why don’t you just show me? We’ll just walk Al’s route, and you can show me; help you get some of this nervous energy out.”

“Okay.”

As you walked beside him—well, if you closed your eyes, he could’ve been Alan, the way he counted his steps, talked to himself, and you realized that what you thought was Alan all those years was Alan mimicking Stitch. Because when you’d finally arrive at Harper’s, Al’s personality would morph again; he’d be more like her, nurturing; the two of them were so physically close sometimes that you felt uncomfortable being there, and that was ridiculous because Harper’s concept of intimacy never involved narrowing down the numbers. And when Alan met Justin, well, he became him; the artistic side of him peeking out, all that talent he had and he only used it to make a friend.

Stitch stopped at the backdoor of a restaurant and pointed to the ground and there were trays of food covered in foil and dated, some of it hot, and then a stack of commercial-sized canned goods; the kind you unloaded and stocked for Gabe every single week.

“It’s shit like this, but it’s at every stop in ten times the amount we usually get. It’s everywhere. Sometimes they’re notes telling us to go somewhere else, some stop that’s not even on our route. And we go there and there’s clothes and books and medicine and hell, there was even an envelope of cash yesterday.”

“Okay, okay,” you told him as you knocked on the back door, loudly, several times. There wasn’t a restaurant in the city you weren’t familiar with, and when the back door flung open, a young woman—Carrie?—you fucked her once, black hair, black clothes, lots of piercings—squealed when she saw you, “Zeek! Oh my god, I haven’t seen you in forever!”

“Hey, Carrie.” (You prayed you were right; she didn’t correct you.)

“What’s up?” And then she saw your companion, “Hey, Stitch.”

“How do you know me?” he demanded.

“Calm down, man.” You stepped inside the door to talk to her and to get away from him for a second. “Sorry, he has such great manners, doesn’t he?”

“I always forget; we’re supposed to pretend we don’t know who he is,” she said.

“Who told you that?”

“Alan. He said he doesn’t like it. That’s why Alan made the rounds. Is that why you’re here?”

There were the familiar sounds of a busy New York restaurant in the background: the sounds of people trying to get a lot done in a small amount of space, plates and glasses clanging together, faucets, wait staff and cooks shouting at one another, cash registers printing receipts…

“I’m trying to help him; he says everyone on Alan’s route is overwhelming them with donations; it’s freaking him out.”

“Well, we’re trying to help. Alan knew so many people; he had this down to a science, and he would tell us—"

“Us?”

“The restaurants on his route. I mean, we know there are children down there; he always knew what he needed Zeek; Lewis is kind of scatterbrained. We don’t really know what else to do. We throw most of this stuff away or give it to shelters; we gave it to Alan because we knew he was doing something with it. He needed it.” And then she stopped and started again, “I mean, I can’t believe he’s gone. I used to see him at least twice a week.”

“I know.”

“The funeral’s tomorrow, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m coming. We all are. We decided this morning; we’re closing our restaurants until five p.m. tomorrow; all of us who were on his route.”

“Whoa.”

“He came to us; tomorrow, we’ll go to him.”

“Maybe afterwards, after the funeral, we can sit down and figure out how to get this stuff to them,” you suggested.

“Sure, of course. Tell his sister that we’ll be there, okay?”

“I will. Thanks.”

She held the door open for you as you walked back out, “It was good to see you again, Zeek. How’s your little brother?”

“Exactly the same.”

“Tell him I said to loosen up.”

“I will, but it won’t help.”

……

“Well, what’d she say?” Stitch asked as soon as the door shut.

“We’re going to meet with the people on his route tomorrow after the funeral and get it all straightened out. You don’t need to worry about it.”

“How does she know me? I wanna know.”

“Stitch, wearing dark glasses doesn’t make you invisible.”

“I know that.”

“Well, how do you think she knows you? I’ll give you two choices: a gigantic government conspiracy or because you hung with Alan and Alan was here twice a week?”

“Probably Al.”

“Gee, you think?”

*********************

The angel answered, "I am Gabriel.”
--Luke 1:19

*********************
TED SCHMIDT’S POV


we’re workin’ our jobs,
collect our pay

The only time Gabe Zirrolli wore a tie to work was when Brian was out of town and had left him in charge. It was a running joke between you and Cynthia, and there was usually an office pool going as to what color it would be because the two of you had begun to notice a trend with Gabe. If Brian had worn a gray tie the week before, then Gabe would wear one the next week. It never failed. He was Brian’s fashion-stalker.

And it’s no secret that Brian subscribes to every remotely popular magazine in circulation; he’s in advertising, but he’s also on the mailing list of every single men’s clothier, cobbler, or pusher of cologne, underwear, jewelry, hair products, sex toys, you-name-it for men. Shortly after settling in at Kinnetik, you had to have a much bigger mailbox installed just to handle all of Brian’s crap.

And it’s also no secret that anytime Brian is done with any of these men’s magazines or catalogs and tosses them in his trash can that Gabe takes them—without asking and without a clue that everyone (including Brian) has seen him do it. You and Cynthia figure he must have an entire room at his condo filled with Brian Kinney glossy mag leftovers because you seriously can’t picture him every throwing any of them away.

Now you have to understand that when Gabe first came to work for Brian and everyone would attend the Wednesday morning management meeting, Gabe was initially showing up in his chef outfit. He spared everyone his precious white hat—in that it wasn’t on his head, but exactly twelve inches to his right on the table--but seeing him (sitting right across from Debbie, mind you) is his starched-like-a-straight-jacket, white, monogrammed chef shirt was enough to get Zeek going and then everyone else laughing and derailing the entire meeting.

“Got a KKK rally after this, ‘Cakes?” Zeek would ask him, and Gabe would glare at him, which would only encourage his brother.

“Wrong hat, dude,” Rube would say.

So Zeek would try something else, “Hey, if we turn off the lights in here, will you glow in the dark?”

“Do it,” Rube said, “See if it works.” (Of course, Ruben was serious.)

“Put your hat on first, man; that’ll be whacked.”

“You’re gonna get whacked if you don’t shut the fuck up,” Gabe would inevitably respond, spiraling into profanity.

And then Zeek asked him if his underwear was white, too, and you had to hold Gabe back; he was ready to fly over the table.

But that particular morning was Thursday, not Wednesday, and the management meeting the day before had been utterly useless. Gabe arrived wearing a black tie, of course, and when he asked if anyone had anything they needed to discuss, Debbie informed him that he didn’t need to keep stopping by at lunchtime because, “All my ketchup bottles are filled. You need to chill.”

And of course Gabe being Gabe couldn’t just leave it alone, “I noticed, however, that, over half of the napkin dispensers weren’t filled to capacity.”

“Well, stay out of the ladies room.”

And then Deb smacked her gum and gave you this shit-eating grin and looked back at Gabe like, What else you got, pretty boy?

……

……

And he (wisely) had nothing, “Well, then, anything else?”

“Yeah,” Ruben offered, “I miss Zeek like whoa.”

……

So you and Cynthia were a bit confused when Gabe walked in Thursday morning in his week old red tie, his briefcase in hand and asked to speak to you alone in your office. You agreed, told him you were going to get some coffee first, so he went down the hall by himself, and Cynthia followed you to the coffee machine, “Oh my god, do you think he’s going to resign or something? He looks pissed off.”

“He always looks like that,” you told her. “It’s part of his je ne sais quoi.”

“Maybe he can’t take it anymore.”

“Take what? Making a shit load of money, running a restaurant with pretty much free reign? Yeah, I’m sure he’s at the end of his rope.”

“Well, go find out.”

……

When you entered your office, Gabe was on his cell phone, and he hung up as you sat down at your desk and asked, “What’s up? Everything okay?”

“Yeah, I just wanted to let you know that I’m going to New York. Zeek’s having a hard time with this.”

“I can imagine.”

“I’m not going to bother Brian with a phone call, from what Zeek tells me, he and Justin are… Well, the whole thing is taking a toll on everyone. Emmett can handle the restaurant.”

“It’s not a problem. Go.”

“Thanks, Ted.”

Ted.

The week had already been so strange; no one calling you Theodore or Pointdexter, and then Gabe walking out of Kinnetik with no spirit in his step or pride in his posture. The only fashion strutting down the runway that morning was grief.

*********************

“Do not be far from me,
for trouble is near
and there is no one to help.
--Psalms 22:11

*********************
FATHER DICK’S POV


God only knows,
God makes his plan,
the information’s unavailable to the mortal man

Back at St. Agnes’s, things weren’t going exactly as planned. You’d envisioned your sanctuary as a lava lamp that day; everyone who was there could do whatever they wanted, move about freely, express themselves, as long as they all stayed inside, but somehow that didn’t seem to be working. Daniel had seemingly disappeared.

Just like Daniel the Prophet, Daniel the Psychiatrist was a strong man, it wasn’t in his nature to walk away from a battle, and it certainly wasn’t like him to abandon the lion’s den all together…and leave the lion behind, especially when you thought, when your instincts told you he might actually be wounded…

But the lion wasn’t exactly licking his wounds; you couldn’t really tell what he was doing, but you sat there and watched him anyway, the sole member of your flock, feeling less like a man of God and more like that Assistant Principal guy in The Breakfast Club presiding over some unholy detention.

*********************

Is not my house right with God?
--2 Samuel 23:5

*********************
JUSTIN’S POV


although I search myself,
there’s always someone else I see

Never in your life had something felt so difficult, and yet you were determined to do what you were supposed to do, what you were expected to do, and so you began on a clean, yellow-ruled page with a Cross ink pen that Daniel had let your borrow and which no doubt had his initials on it somewhere…

It took you almost an hour, but it felt like twelve, and when you were done you had a headache and were really thirsty. The only person around was Father Dick who was sitting at the piano, so you walked up to him, handed him the pad and pen and said, “I don’t know where Daniel went, but I’m done. Can you give this to him for me?”

*********************

“This man Daniel was found to have a keen mind and knowledge and understanding, and also the ability to interpret dreams, explain riddles and solve difficult problems. Call for Daniel, and he will tell you what the writing means."
--Daniel 5:15

*********************
FATHER DICK’S POV


alone in the church by and by

You took it from Justin and laid it on top of the piano, “You going somewhere?”

“I want to get out of here; get something to eat. You know, clear my head.”

“Okay, but if you’re hungry, we have a fully stocked kitchen downstairs.” He looked mildly interested. “In fact, I think that’s where Nate and Sam are. Why don’t you go down there and see?”

Justin glanced back at the pad he’d given you and then asked, “The kitchen’s through which door?”

You pointed the way, “Right over there. I’ll be down there in a minute; I’m starving, too.”

And when he vanished through the doorway, you glanced around a few times, felt like you were all alone, and then slid the pad across the top of the piano until it was close enough that you could read it. You were pulling your reading glasses out of your shirt pocket when a quiet voice came from behind you, scaring the ever-loving shit out of you, “He finally finished?”

“Holy mother of Jesus!” It was Daniel. “Where have you been?”

“Hiding in the confessional.”

Why didn’t I think to look there?

“So this is it, huh?” Daniel said, tilting it a little so he could see it better.

“Is this one of those things that I’m allowed to look at?”

Daniel smiled as he flipped through the pages, “I don’t see why, not like he’s my patient.”

So you resumed finding the perfect spot on your nose for your glasses…

“Let me know when I can turn the page,” Daniel said.

“Turn.”

 
“I’m ready,” you told him.

“Whoa,” you said when both of you were done. “What do you think?”

“That’s about what I was expecting.”

“See, that’s what freaks me out about you and Jon, that whole ‘nothing’s ever a surprise to me’ thing you have going on.”

Daniel laughed, “That’s not always the case. We were very surprised when we met you.”

“Oh, wow, I’m so flattered.”

Daniel smiled at you, “You’re so kooky.”

“So, is Justin right about what he says?”

“What do you mean?”

“That he’s more subtle in charcoal?”

Daniel tore off the top three pages of the pad, folded them and put them and his pen in his pocket, “Justin? Subtle? I’m afraid not. There are shades of gray, I suppose, but he always gets his point across.”

“Is he really going to read that at the funeral?” you asked.

“God, no. He isn’t even making a speech.”

“He isn’t?”

“No, he’s going to narrate the slide show.”

“But…then…why…does he know he’s narrating the slide show?” you wanted to know.

“Not yet. He’ll think it’s his idea in about an hour.”

“You’re ‘old school’ aren’t you, doc? You’ve got the whole thing planned out before anything goes down, don’t you?”

“Isn’t that what you told me? Old Testament, Daniel has the gift of prophecy; he knows the outcome from the get go?”

“Your mother must’ve been a good Christian woman.”

“From your mouth to God’s ears. Now, remind me again what Jon’s gift is?”

This was, hands down, Daniel’s favorite Bible story of all time…

How in The Old Testament, Daniel was strong, and brave, and always right, being a prophet and all, and how in The New Testament, well, John couldn’t really make up his mind. Was he…

John the Baptist?
John the Disciple?
John the Evangelist?
John the Elder?
John the Divine?

Well, you can see the difficulty inherent in that. According to Daniel—the earthly one—it was par for the course because his best friend could never just be good at one thing, he had to excel at everything, and while he was doing that, he had to go all over the world espousing all of his brilliant theories and techniques—the Gospel according to Dr. Jon (if you will) —and knowing Jon, he probably really believed he was related to Jesus, some eight hundred and twenty-seventh cousin twice-removed or something. So, basically, Jon’s talent was running his mouth, and as far as Daniel was concerned, that played second fiddle to a prophet any day of the week.

(You didn’t have the heart to tell Daniel that John was much better looking.)

……

You were getting close to the church kitchen and could hear Sam doing his Julia Child impression, and that’s when you asked Daniel, “How do you think Jon’s doing out there? You know, taking it to the streets? We haven’t heard from him.”

“That’s probably a good thing,” Daniel told you, “Just means that when we do, the story he tells will be that much longer.”

“Yeah, I know. I gotta find my ear plugs.”

*********************

 
"If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone..."
--John 8:7

*********************
JONATHON MASSEY’S POV


we’d like to know a little bit about you for our files

Brian was rescuing a tomato that had rolled off his salad plate when you asked him, “You mentioned earlier, you have a son?”

He smiled, “Yeah, Gus. He lives in Toronto.”

“How old is he?”

“Eleven going on twenty.”

“Must’ve be hard to have him so far away, especially when he was an infant.”

“Oh, no, he lived in Pittsburgh until he was five. He was born the night I met Justin actually.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, our nocturnal activities were interrupted by a junket to the maternity ward. Justin named him.”

“That is absolutely bizarre.” (Again, you reminded yourself…recent head injury.)

“Well, it was a good thing because if Justin hadn’t been there, I’d have a son named Abraham.” You choked on your Diet Coke, coughing because it went down the wrong pipe. “Are you okay?” Brian asked. “Want me to smack you on the back or something?”

“I’m fine; I’m fine. Are you shitting me with this?” you asked when you recovered.

“Honest Abe. He lives in Canada now with his two moms and his sister, Jenny.”

“Is she yours as well?”

“No, she was fathered by my friend, Michael.”

“I feel like I should be paying you for this entertainment or something.”

He laughed, “You can’t afford me, trust me.”

“So tell me about Gus; what’s he like?”

“What’s he like…

“Well, he’s your average boy, I guess, except that he’s raised by two lesbians and has a fag for a dad, so that’s kind of odd. I mean, he called me the other day to tell me that he still thinks girls are disgusting but that doesn’t mean he’s gay yet.”

“Okay.”

“He just wanted me to know that, you know, in case I was sitting around wondering if my son was gay yet or something.”

“Interesting.”

“He gives me a status report on the straight/gay thing about every few months. Kind of reminds me of a freshman in college who keeps calling home to tell his parents that he’s changed his major.”

“He’s conscious of your expectations in that department?”

“Well, I think he thinks I have expectations in that department, so he just wants to keep me updated. He does the same thing to Lindsay. We had ‘the talk’ with him almost two years ago, and now he pays us back by having ‘the talk’ with us.”

“Tit for tat.”

“Well, no tits. Those are still disgusting.”

“Right, I get it. Well, I have to admit I’m a little envious; that’ll probably be my main regret in life—not having children.”

“There’s certainly nothing more terrifying than producing a tiny version of yourself, but you have plenty to be proud of; you’re fucking a priest.”

*********************

A gossip betrays a confidence,
but a trustworthy man keeps a secret.
--Proverbs 11:13

*********************



anything we are
you and I have always been
for ever and ever

Okay.

Admittedly, at first, you were a little taken aback, and granted, people that suffer sudden and unexpected head injuries have been known to spew profanities at nuns and other such things, so you sat back for a minute to try to gage Brian’s intention, and then he must’ve realized what he said and laughed at you. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

And then you laughed and you went back to your salads and it was all good. It was sort of better than good; it was rather fortuitous, if you will…

“Actually, Brian, I was kind of hoping I could talk to you about that…whole…thing.”

“Talk to me?”

“You know, off the record.”

“When were we on the record?” he wanted to know.

“Okay, good point.”

“Why’d you wanna talk to me about it? Justin tell you I fucked a preacher before or something?”

“No, he didn’t, but you did?”

“Yeah, and he was there, too. We were at the baths; it was hot.”

“Okay, TMI, but, well, I wanted to talk to you about it because even though I’ve only known you for a very short while—"

“And let’s face it, for most of that time, I haven’t been conscious.”

“True. I think you'd be the one person who can help me with the aspect of my relationship with Richard that I’m really struggling with.”

Brian looked at you in a rather peculiar way, studying you with one eyebrow up and then the other, “It’s a cold day in hell when anyone solicits me for relationship advice.”

And then you couldn’t stand it anymore, you just blurted out what had been bothering you for months, what you’d been keeping inside unable to express to anyone—including Daniel—hell, especially Daniel, “I need your help. Richard, he wears Wrangler® jeans, and I can’t get him to stop. Wrangler® jeans and flannel shirts. He’s a priest who’s really a fag dressed like a lesbian.”

You felt so much better after just getting that out in the open.

……

“You were right to come to me,” Brian said, finally appreciating the gravity of your situation. “Are you in love with him?”

“Oh god, please, let’s just not even go there.”

“I can’t help you if you don’t tell me everything,” he said, his elbows propped on the table so that his hands could face each other and his fingertips could do that evil dance that villains always do in the movies before they dip their prey into a vat of hot wax.

“Yes,” you said, sounding like a love-sick twelve-year-old with braces, “Yes, I love him.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

“You don’t think it’s fixable?” you asked him.

“That depends. Does his ass look good in Wrangler® jeans?”

(Oh, the shame of it all…)

“Yes.”

“Then I’m afraid you’re doomed.”

Nooooooooo.

……

“Jon, I’m kidding.”

“Oh, thank god.”

“I know exactly what you’re going through. When I met Justin, he was attending a private school and had to wear a uniform—"

“That’s hot.”

“Hold on a second, please. Yes, it was hot some of the time, but it was also a rather horrific reminder that I was fucking somebody who’s biggest worry in life was his SAT score.”

“So what did you do? How did you handle it?”

“I just pretended that we were in a porno movie.”

“Yeah, but that’s so cheap, so tacky, so—"

“Jon, desperate times call for desperate measures.” And then Brian got a dreamy look on his face, “It did take me a long time to get that soundtrack out of my head though. I’d only use it as a temporary solution.”

“Well, then what’s the long term solution?”

Brian thought about it for a while, your salad plates disappeared making way for your entrees, and he was cutting his steak to be sure they cooked it to his specifications when it came to him, “We brainwash him.”

“Brainwash him? How?”

“Lock him in a dark room for twenty-four hours and make him watch a non-stop slide show of Jesus wearing all the high-end labels.”

“What about the sandals? Does Armani or Gucci make sandals?”

“Hmm, good question. I’ll have to look into that.”

And then Brian’s cell phone rang. “Is it Justin?” you asked. He shook his head. “It’s Zeek,” and he flipped it open…

“Yeah.”

“He is?”

“Actually, that would be great. Have him bring a suit, shirt, shoes, everything for Justin for tomorrow.”

“Left side.”

……

“You are?”

……

“Whoa.”

……

……

“Hey—

“Whatever I said to you last night—"

“Twenty percent my ass.”

“Okay, later.”

He hung up and told you, “Gabe’s coming up, Zeek’s brother, which works out—"

“Justin didn’t bring a suit with him?” you asked.

“No.”

“Did you?”

He laughed, “Of course, I never go anywhere without a suit.”

“Why didn’t Justin bring one?” you asked.

Brian looked at you like were an idiot, shrugged his shoulders, and started eating his steak.

“Because he didn’t think Alan was going to die?” you asked.

“I told him there was no harm in just packing one,” Brian said, his voice suddenly flat, no emotion at all.

“But he wouldn’t?”

He didn’t answer your question, but the emotion was back, “I said, ‘There’s room in my suitcase. I can put it in mine if you want.’”

“And?” you asked.

“He more or less told me-in a nice way-to fuck off.”

*********************

 
Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.
--Deuteronomy 30:19

*********************

HARPER COLLINS’S POV


and ask many questions as children often do

Amelia had eaten a champion’s lunch in Macy’s café: a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, macaroni and cheese, chocolate milk, and was rounding it off with a gingerbread man whose head she would eat last so that she’d have somebody to talk to up to the very last second. When the three of you sat down to eat, you and Sarah realized that in all of the chaos, you’d never actually gotten a dress for Amelia, so she’d volunteered to go back upstairs to the children’s department to get the two you both liked and the little shoes while you stayed with Amelia because you needed to talk with your daughter one-on-one. Not about her new life of crime, but about what was happening the next day, make sure she understood at least the basics about her Uncle Alan, that he was never coming back.

You’d put it off for as long as you could.

“I’m bery, bery sorry, Misser Gingerbed, but I hafta eat you now,” Amelia said to her cookie, and then she did what she always does, which is take a big bite and then try to chew while pretending to channel the perishing gingerbread man’s agony at the same time. It’s disturbing and it’s all Sam’s fault because he animates everything. God forbid a cookie just be a cookie, you know?

He told you it was an unfortunate side effect from a very lonely childhood, and that made you feel really bad for him, so you quit picking on him and probably gave him an extra blow job or something. But now that the cookie was gone and Amelia was immensely proud of herself for eating her entire lunch perched on her throne (booster seat) for all of Macy’s to see, you decided to try and see if you could explain this whole fucking mess to her.

“’Melia?”

“I ate a bery good lunch, Mommy.”

“You sure did. You were hungry.”

“Yeah.”

“You remember this morning when I told you that we were going shopping today to buy a dress for you for tomorrow?”

“Yeah, ‘cause it’s my birfday.”

“No, honey. It’s not your birthday tomorrow; your birthday is a month from now. Tomorrow we have to wear a dress for Uncle Alan, remember?”

“I ‘member.”

“What do you remember?” you asked her.

She looked at you, and then reached out with her peanut butter fingers and touched your hair, and said, “’Cause Brime Kinney is here,” as if it was a subject far too serious for you to trouble yourself with.

You held her hand, wiping it off with a napkin, “Why is Brian here, Amelia?”

“Because Waffle is bery sad.”

“Why do you think Justin is sad?”

Amelia fidgeted in her booster seat, drank some more milk, and when you prodded her again, she said, “’Cause I frowed the pink people cookies all the way ‘cross the studio ‘cause you were sad and Brime Kinney was ‘upposed to—"

“Why was I sad, Amelia?”

“’Cause Brime Kinney was—"

You tried another way, “’Melia, remember when you met Brian, what did you do for him?”

“I frowed my cookies.”

“No, before that, the first time. You showed him something, remember? And Daddy was helping you?”

She tapped her feet on her chair, “My Uncle Alan dance, like this.” And she did her seated version which garnered quite a few weird stares from people at nearby tables.

“Right, you did your dance. Why did you have to do it for Brian and not for Uncle Alan? Do you remember?”

“'Cause Uncle Alan, he was atted the hobspital.”

“Why didn’t Uncle Alan come home from the hospital?” you asked her.

She threw her little hands up the same way she does when she defends the fly in the ice cube, “’Cause he just lives there now.”

“Come here, ‘Melia,” you said as you picked your daughter up and held her in your lap, mostly so she wouldn’t see you cry. “You know how Dr. Cartwright and Dr. Jon work at the hospital every day, how they help people get better?”

“'Cause Dr. Car-ride and Dr. Jon, sometimes they fix peoples a lot.”

“Right. But sometimes people can’t be fixed. Sometimes they’ve been hurt too badly and they die.”

“I knowed that,” she said, playing with her shoes, probably getting bored with your attempts at explanation.

“Uncle Alan got hurt, Amelia, and he’s not coming back; we’re not going to see him again. He couldn’t be fixed.”

“He was too boken.”

“Right.” And then you stood her up on your lap and turned her around to face you, “So tomorrow we’re going to wear pretty dresses and go to church with Daddy and Dr. Cartwright, and Dr. Jon, and Justin—"

“And Brime Kinney.”

“And Brian, and Sarah, and Zeek and we’re going to tell Uncle Alan how much we love him, and how much we’re going to miss him, and then we’re going to tell him good-bye.”

“I’m going to be sad like you, Mommy.”

“I’ll be very sad tomorrow; everybody will.”

“Yeah, and then it’s my birfday.”

As you gave her a hug, you saw Sarah coming back down the escalator. Amelia was close enough you thought and as long as Brian was in New York every day was her birthday anyway…

*********************

 
But Ruth replied, "Don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me."
--Ruth 1:16-17

*********************
LEO BROWN’S POV


people get ready

And so it came to pass in the AfterDeath that all Hell began to break loose, and you began to wonder as you raced from crisis to crisis if you were all just pawns in some Unholy video game that had just sold out in the Netherworld. The order of events, well, who knows; it probably doesn’t really matter…

All of the televisions were on; they were all blaring, all showing different things, Chris was still hovering over Cody, perpetually stuck in his predatory stance, and Alan was going berserk trying to keep up with all the feeds because, “Everybody’s everywhere. What the fuck is going on?” He said they all felt equally important to him; he could no longer distinguish priorities; he was being flooded. He turned to Ruth, to his mother for guidance, but she—and you’re gonna love this—was running the kitchen.

Jack had been tossed out on his keester, but not by any of you, by whoever or whatever was lubing the cosmic joystick. And Ruth didn’t want to be in there, but she wasn’t given a choice. And it wasn’t a kitchen anymore either. It was a bar… One guess. Yep.

Babylon.

“This is NOT good,” Vic declared. “Not good at all.”

“Why?” you asked him. “Why?”

“I don’t know; I’m just telling you this is bad news.”

……

Because there was no ladies room for Sandra Massey to banish herself to while she watched her son commit heresy of every imaginable type with his clergy-lover, she’d banished herself to cowering underneath the picnic table and was refusing to come out, screaming and begging for forgiveness while Emma Cartwright stood in front of the televisions and beamed from ear to ear as her son made her proud over and over and over. Emma had worn Sandra down, proudly pointing out all of Jonathon’s flaws---namely his express-train to Hell and the fact that, “I think he really does think he’s Jesus. He’s absolutely delusional.” As a result, Sandra had yanked nearly every last hair out of her head.

And for all the bitching and moaning Jack did when he was in the kitchen, he couldn’t bear to be outside of it. He was a nervous wreck, pacing, biting his fingernails, cursing, trying to get back in and being bounced off by some invisible shield, and were he not already bald, his hair would’ve probably been yanked out, too. But while Alan was watching Harper and Amelia shop, Nate and Sam fiddle at the piano, Justin fume over his argument with Brian and with Daniel, and Father Dick and Jon pass lusty glances at one another when they thought no one was looking, the TV volume went off, the lights went out and then came back on—neon and strobe that time—and club music began to pulse through the whole place.

“Oh shit,” said Vic. “Oh shit.”

And then a weird smell came wafting through…

“What is that?” Emma asked.

And you and Vic answered in unison, “Man sex.”

“No!” Sandra screamed from under the picnic table, “No, please, no!”

And then you looked over at Ruth and oh-my-god. She was young and hot and tending bar, and Alan said, “Mom, you look just like Harper!”

“Thanks!” And she was smiling and having a good time and then all the screens began to show the same image: Brian and Jon, leaving the church, getting in a cab, unpacking a chair, all of it to a thumpa, thumpa dance beat, and then daylight again and cigarettes, and a lot of nothing and then…

”JACK KINNEY, ORDER UP!”

Brian flat on his back on the sidewalk and Jon panicking.

“What’s going on?” Sandra asked, smacking her head on the table as she tried to look up.

”NOW, KINNEY. ORDER UP!”

And Ruth was insistent, banging on the bar, and the image on the screen had frozen—paused on all nine screens.

”GET YOUR ASS OVER HERE, JACK!”

And Jack was walking—not of his own free will—and kept glancing at the televisions and then back at Ruth, and when he finally got to the bar, Ruth smiled at him and said, “What’ll it be?”

“You bitch.”

“I’m sorry; I don’t know how to make one of those,” she said, sweet as Georgia pie, and then sat a huge Martini down in front of him. Jack stared at it, and stared at it, and you knew he wanted it because the AfterDeath sure as hell didn’t have liquor by the drink, but when he tried to pick it up, it was too heavy. He turned and looked over his shoulder at all of you watching him, and when he turned back around, the olives had risen to the top.

Jack read what they said and shook his head like he didn’t understand, so you walked over to him, “What’s wrong?”

“Look at it,” he demanded, his voice wavering like he was actually going to cry or something.

So you did.

“Who is it?” Vic asked.

“Nobody,” you replied.

And then music stopped and the feed on the televisions was playing again. Brian was trying to sit up simultaneously on all nine screens.

“What do you mean ‘nobody?’” Vic asked. “It’s always somebody.”

“Look at it,” you told him. “Come look at it. It isn’t a name; all it says is:

“EMPATHY.”




Lyrics taken from This Little Light of Mine author unknown, George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord, Brewer and Shipley’s One Toke Over the Line, Three Dog Night’s Joy to the World, The Police’s Spirits in the Material World, The Beatles’s Come Together, Laurie London’s He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands, B. J. Thomas’s (Hey Won't You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song, Republica’s Ready to Go, Matchbox Twenty’s Bent, The Beatles’s Yesterday, Seal’s Kiss From a Rose, Billy Jam’s Put the Needle on the Record, Gene McLellan’s Put Your Hand in the Hand, Oasis’s Wonderwall, Brewer and Shipley’s One Toke Over the Line again, The Talking Heads And She Was, the nursery rhyme This Little Piggy Went to Market, The Beatles’s Come Together again, Paul Simon’s Slip Sliding Away twice, Elton John’s Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me, Live’s I Alone, Simon and Garfunkel’s Mrs. Robinson from the motion picture soundtrack of The Graduate. Kenny Loggins’s Whenever I Call You Friend, Dishwalla’s Counting Blue Cars, and Curtis Mayfield’s People Get Ready.

Bible verses taken from…

Oh come on…

I'll give you three guesses…

Icon bases used throughout this story came from basicbases, basebeat, khushi_icons, obsessiveicons, graphical_love, anithradia, simplybases, randomicons, bases_by_maggie, foryourhead, icon_goddess, amillionicons, joelzbutterly, icon_duration, and some icon communities at Greatest Journal, and the website Absolute Trouble.