Mene Mene

 

 

 

No, no, no the clouds didn’t clear. It rained the whole day actually. Nobody went anywhere, we just stayed inside. I mean I didn’t even find out what  happened until the next morning when we went to the Lodge for lunch and the whole parking lot must’ve been filled up with cars and there was no more room inside so people were just standing out front and I saw Richard and Susan — and I hadn’t seen them for years since he could barely leave the house because of his legs — and Susan gave it straight and screamed “The Peterson boy is alive!” before I even got close enough to say hi.

 

And yeah we weren’t thinking about what this really meant. We weren’t really thinking about the logistics. I mean in the moment when something happens to you you aren’t gonna immediately start looking for “why” you’re just gonna deal with the situation as it is right? And so that’s what we did.

 

Like this was ‘77 what do you expect should’ve happened? Of course it didn't make the news. The family wanted to keep it hushed up. I mean they were embarrassed; wouldn't you be embarrassed? But everyone did know about it anyway: you can ask around if you want — anybody who lived here back then who’s still around. Yeah, there’s a couple others left. Like just go down Lakeshore and ask Jenny about it…she was much younger but she was there…she’ll tell you everything I just said word for word I can promise you that.

 

It's not quite a miracle regardless of how much some people wished it was; hell I remember back in middle school reading an old book – I think the author was British – where something exactly like it happened. I've always liked British authors but this wasn’t like what I read now. I like detective stories. You ever read Agatha Christie? Those are my favorite: when you don’t know who did it, when anybody could be the murderer or innocent as a lamb, and then Poirot sits you down and explains everything that really happened—a second story behind the one you were reading—and you just read in awe. But you see I don’t really read the later ones she wrote; the ones from when she was old. There’s something sad about them: her memory started to go and so the plots got all simple and it sort of seems like Poirot is not really solving a mystery at all – he’s just trying to tidy up the sad little mess that Agatha Christie left him with. But anyway, I remember being scared out of my mind after reading this other book. I guess this was probably like 7th grade in ‘62 or whatever so it was appropriate and all that—but it was still really something. And then when it did happen, in real life, it felt weird, I mean it felt so weird like something had come out of my brain like a dream or something — I mean literally de—ja—vu, so I guess on the bright side I didn’t take it too seriously when it happened, unlike some other people. Like my sister.

 

Ran off with a preacher right out of seminary a couple weeks after. She said that God “told her to'' through the Peterson boy coming back to life. Thought she was crazy but they’ve been married almost fifty years now and he still has a good congregation up north and she seems happy and they have grandkids so maybe she was right. What do I know? There were plenty of other people in the area who treated it in the same way she did—like it was some kind of fiery bolt shot out of heaven aimed directly at their own hearts.

 

And I don’t want to judge or anything like that but from the details and an ounce of common sense I think any reasonable person could tell that this was nothing of the sort, and that there was something… something a little off about a person who would try to connect themselves to something like this.

 

A boy drowns in the club pool and then two days later is gasping out breaths in the morgue and you think the world is telling you something?

 

I mean Jim’s older brother — exactly — just the type of thing you would expect out of a mess like this: it clearly had nothing to do with him but he goes off on the sort of charismatic wave…yeah that wasn’t too uncommon back then by itself…I figure y’all don’t know about cessationism or any of that but yeah it happened where folks would make the jump and I don’t judge them too hard: some of them came out better for it but really we just saw it as a common quirk or oddity you know people would mention it behind their backs like “she’s been going to x” or whatever but these were nice and decent people so we tolerated it of course.

 

But Jim’s brother yeah he was a special case you see because he goes off and becomes a pentecostal or whatever after it happened and that’s that but then a couple years later someone…I forget who it was, pretty sure it was one of Susan’s cousins or maybe it was her brother I really don’t remember…but anyway whoever it was had been on some trip to South Carolina and while they were in Charleston saw a flier somewhere, I think they said it was stuck onto a telephone pole, with Jim’s brother’s name on it and the name of some rinky-dink strip mall type pentecostal church in a poorer part of the city so of course Susan’s cousin — and of course I have no idea what sort of business he was up to but I guess he had time — heads down there to take a look.

 

I mean I would have too: Jim was off in the Marines at this point, the parents had moved out, we were all curious as people get to be about these sort of things, not judging just curious, so they went down to the church which was just as crumpled and commercial as the flier made it look like and there he is — Jim’s brother right up by the thin metal lectern, microphone in hand, yelling and screaming and speaking in tongues and the like. But none of that was as interesting as what Susan’s cousin heard when the congregation cooled off and he settled down into the sermon.

 

You see I’d heard of this sort of thing before, I mean it was a common sort of warning you heard when people talked about these charismatic type churches: that the pastors and worship leaders would have all sorts of miraculous stories about their lives…almost always their childhood, maybe that they had been visited by an angel, or seen some miracle performed, or even performed one themselves — healing, prophecies, that sort of thing. But now there’d never be anyone there who could verify if any of this really happened or not…you always had to take their word for it. And what always happened was five to ten years into whatever church they ministered at, they’d make some people mad or take too much in offerings and someone would go look, and they would always find some kind of ridiculous fabrication in whatever backstory the preacher had been peddling up to this point. But the preacher would just jump ship to a different congregation who didn’t know anything at all about that and the cycle would just repeat itself again and again.

 

Back in the old days I figure this would probably end with a town getting all worked up and lynching the preacher or at least sending him off with just the clothes on his back and alerting the neighboring towns but at least when I was younger everyone always made it sound like it was a real racket and whether this was true or not, I don’t claim to know, it definitely properly scared me away from those type of places so I do think it was good advice in some way.

 

But anyway the cousin is there listening to Jim’s brother do the whole backstory routine, and he’s completely shocked: because there’s Jim’s brother telling the audience everything there was to know about what happened, but twisting things around — saying he was there at the pool, making it out to relate to himself, suggesting the whole thing was some sort of sign from God about himself, that he was chosen by God personally “through” what happened. And worst of all, if I’m remembering correctly,  Jim’s brother told everyone he was the first one to see him alive, the first witness, which was a lie: anyone who lived here could tell you who the first person there was and what they themselves were doing right then, and regardless their house had to have been at least two miles away from the morgue, maybe even three, so God knows what Jim’s brother would’ve been up to had he actually been all the way down there on that random Sunday when it was raining hard, like rocks coming down from the sky.

 

It was Dr. Richards who was coming in to get some files — it was Sunday so he wasn’t there earlier like he normally would be for work…yes exactly what would Jim’s brother be doing down there at the morgue, that’s ridiculous to anyone with more than cabbage in their head or at least to anyone who lived around here; maybe that’s why he got real out of the way fast. Hell, maybe in a couple of years he’ll be even farther away at some run-down house church even further south and tell ‘em that it happened to him just so he can pay the bills.

 

Well anyway when Susan’s cousin saw the load of bullshit that Jim’s brother had worked the crowd up with he just gave a big snort and laughed his way back to town. He thought it was the stupidest thing in the world. But some people got real mad, took it too seriously — a couple of the zealous bunch went all the way back down there and told him to shut up about it or hit the road. I don’t know why they got so worked up — like I said, everybody knew about those types of preachers so it wasn’t exactly a huge shocker and it’s not like he had been goin’ around and givin’ out the names and addresses of everyone who lived around here…No it’s not like that…still I get that the thing makes people uneasy.

 

This is how I always thought about it — the problem is that it doesn’t make sense to anyone, not even us churchgoers. It looks like a mistake, like something that shouldn’t have happened, so much that even when you go back and look at the tattered bible stuck into the back of the pew it just makes it worse—you feel even more confused and turn the page again and the worse and the worse it gets you see? And even worse for the backsliders and unbelievers because you well know that if something like that happened within a square mile of your house any of you would be struck with the sort of righteous fervor I’m talking about — see and you’re not even denying it — it’s ridiculous.

 

No, but see the real problem is the same on both sides; in any case, science, God, whatever, things are supposed to make sense — things happen for a reason, rules that can’t be broken, all of that cushioning but when you take that ax for a swing against the real world it might be good for a couple of logs but it always shatters. Something extraordinary happens and then you actually bother to look around and see how strange everything is—everything; it doesn’t make any goddamn sense that a hundred thousand people die every day for no good reason and no one can really say where they’re going or where the hundred thousand who appear to replace them are coming from or whether it makes any sense that some people die and come back and die again but I mean in some sense I guess we’re all just coming back every day just a wretch away from the grave but why did he get to come back? When you’re refrigerated meat in the morgue for two days why does He send you back; why do your parents get the sorrow but then the joy, horribly mixed, when all the others only get the sorrow? Why did he even bother to give them the sorrow? But then you’ve gotta think about if that’s even true and about joy and goodness where it comes from but we don’t want to do that; we didn’t want to do that here and I don’t think that’s what you’re really here to do either is it? But honestly why are you here? He’s gone; he’s been gone, but I’m sure you already knew that.

 

There’s really nothing else here now, just me and the postman and the scent of a different town; of woods and streams and prefab houses. And childhood. I moved back here twenty years ago — I couldn’t leave it behind. Some kind of lesson or parable in that I guess: to free one person, another gets stuck — in a very different kind of way. Everything needs to be evened out—sacrifices, propitiation, and the like. Yes, a very different sort of way. This was my childhood room actually. Can’t you tell? It’s the exact same as it was back then, carpet, wallpaper, bedsheets, fixtures— I got it redone, redone like this when I moved back in. You know back when my parents were alive and could still visit they never stayed the night. They thought it was eerie — there was something wrong about all of it: to wake up disoriented, frozen in place, and in the brief moment before you regain your composure, wonder if the next half century had all been some kind of tremendous dream, some great wonder of the imagination. I would find that odd too. I sometimes wonder if that was what it was like. What he felt. But I never asked.