Magnificent Vibration Read online

  I look up from my current project and put my musings on how I could manage to get my twelve-year-old ass over to Scotland to view this magical beast for myself on hold, in time to see two spiffily dressed young people walking up our driveway. A young man and a young woman, both wearing black and each carrying some sort of book that looks suspiciously like a Bible. They appear so clean and scrubbed that the ol’ family homestead suddenly takes on the aspect of a white-trash, doublewide meth lab by comparison.

  There is a knock at our front door and I hear Josephine, my older sister by six years, answer. Josephine is named, of course, after Josephine de Beauharnais, Napoleon Bonaparte’s first wife, another trendy historical reference from our mother’s canon. A muffled conversation ensues. Josephine enters my little monster-sanctuary of a bedroom minutes later with a tense, pinched expression on her face and fear in her green eyes. I know what she is about to ask me and still I have no answers although I have tried to find them these past three years. She is the one female in my life who is safe. She is all-giving, all-loving, all-tortured, and all mine. I would give my meager twelve years to free her from whatever it is that causes her to relentlessly interrogate me with the same crazy questions. Questions that I can never answer to her satisfaction. Even if I understood. Even if I had the answers. We are both helpless when this demon has her in its clutches.

  Our parents are even more clueless and confused about her condition. Her obsessive fears have reached such a magnitude that she can barely exist in this world anymore and I am powerless to help my sweet, broken sister. She is also under the dominion of a debilitating depression that sends her into dark downward spirals where she cannot raise a smile even for her dork-stick of a brother. It is a one-two punch that literally cripples her. The young girl she once was, with the wicked wit, bright smile, and open-door policy for the world and all of its people is gone, apparently for good. For the life of me I cannot figure out, in my young mind, what changed in her life to cause this drastic change in her spirit. I have heard phrases bandied about—“brain-chemical issues,” “Lithium,” “long-term psychotherapy”—but I still really don’t understand any of it and am completely and broken-heartedly baffled. The only passion she still has is for the music she loves. I think she finds some solace from her demons, earphones clamped tight to her head, eyes clenched shut, the guitars blasting, drums pounding. But the singer from her favorite band has just killed himself, so there is a tortured aspect even to this. And Nirvana is no more.

  “Tio,” she says to me as I sort through the pieces of a plastic “Creature from the Black Lagoon” model kit I’m struggling to glue together without getting them stuck to my fingers or the paper instruction sheet, “there’s two people at the door.” My sister is the only one I allow to reference my atrocious birth name. And in her beautiful compassion she picked “Tio” over the other possible syllabic choices—“Hor” (whore) and “rat” (rodent). My mother calls me “Horatio,” of course, and I have no defense against it. My father calls me “boy.” I answer my Josephine.

  “Yeah, I saw them walking up the drive. What do they want?” I’m hoping the conversation will go in any other direction. But it doesn’t.

  “I think the boy has a sore on his lip,” she says.

  “It’s okay. It’s not herpes. And if it was, you couldn’t get it just by looking at him.”

  “But I think he rubbed his mouth before I shook his hand.”

  “I really don’t think you get it like that, Josie, honestly,” I try, although I have no real idea what herpes is or how one gets the damned thing. I suspect it may have something to do with monsters I am not yet aware of, but I have no proof. I do know that my sweet sister is terrified, with her whole being, of contracting this herpes thing. I wish I knew how to help her. She who was always there for me when I was small. She who had comforting words that healed my little broken heart. She who cheered for me like I’d won when I came in seventh place in the 100-yard dash. She who protected me, even taking on a bully once on the way home from school. She who was my avenging angel against everything that frightened and intimidated me as a young boy. She who was more a mother to me than my own mother. But not now. And I am powerless to help her.

  “So I couldn’t get it, even if he touched his lips and then his hand brushed against me?” she probes.

  “I don’t think so, Jo. I’ll go talk to them.”

  “Can you look at it? The thing on his lip,” she plaintively begs my retreating back.

  It’s hard to believe sometimes that I am her younger sibling by so many years when she falls into one of these endless mental loops. She sounds like a little girl pleading for a favor from Daddy.

  I walk down the hall to the front door. Two spectacularly clean young people stand as if to attention behind the bug screen. They are immaculate human beings.

  “What do you want?” I ask a little defensively. The dude has already worried my sister, so that’s a big strike against him.

  The girl speaks. She is fresh, polished, and, to my young eyes, another of God’s exquisite handiworks.

  “We’d like to talk to you about Jesus,” she states with a bright-eyed zeal that immediately attracts me. It doesn’t take much.

  The man has a small, dying zit in the corner of his mouth. I assume this is what has my sister in such a state. It doesn’t take much.

  Josie joins me at the door. “We already go to church,” she says.

  “That’s great,” replies the perky girl. “What church do you guys attend?”

  “The Presbyterian on Edward Street. It’s our mom’s church,” my sister replies. She can seem like she’s functioning fairly normally in public situations like this, but once she’s alone, her demons will pounce upon her like frat boys on a drunken sorority sister.

  “We’d love to come in and talk to you about our amazing church.” Again, it’s the perky girl talking. She seems to pick up on me and my unyielding gaze, directed mainly at her sumptuous breasts, as the easiest mark and begins directing her carefully rehearsed spiel to yours enthralled.

  “We’re Mormons,” she informs us, smiling at me. And I am suddenly interested in Mormons, whatever they are.

  “I’d like to sit down with you personally, young man, one-on-one, and tell you how our church changed my life, and how it can change yours, too.”

  Oh, she’s good. She’s very good.

  I push open the screen door like a zombie Mina Harker inviting Dracula in. I hear my sister’s stifled cry of opposition but I am powerless under the gaze of this bewitching . . . “Moron,” was it? Proof, I think, of what a truly crappy, selfish little brother I really was.

  “May we talk with you separately?” Dracula asks me.

  Again, Josephine’s stifled resistance. Again I ignore it.

  “Okay. Are you going to talk with me?” I ask her. Really, what a dick I was.

  “I’d love to. And Bradley here will discuss our Lord with your . . . sister, is it?” Dracula, the little stunner, continues.

  “Cool. Her name is Josephine.” My sister is giving me seriously angry, desperate looks now. I signal her, in the silent code that we’ve developed over the years, to stop worrying; that everything will be okay. But she is signaling back that everything will definitely not be okay.

  “We can sit in the living room, and they can go to the kitchen,” I say, taking charge and guiding the situation now, with visions of I don’t know what but they vaguely involve Woody and this burning-hot archangel. It’s a potent, intoxicating feeling. These two seem like they would do anything to have us become fellow Morons. I have no idea what price I would ask, but I’m willing to have some guidance. Miss Dracula looks like she knows a thing or two about this. We sit on the sofa, Drac and I. She is so close to me that I can see down her top at the tantalizing crest of her breasts as they rise and fall in remarkable rhythm with her breathing, and although most of the girls I know don’t even have breasts yet, I am not immune to their charms.

  “Wh
at’s your name again?” Dracula begins.

  “Tio—no, it’s Bob,” I reply, making an instant decision that might possibly have an impact on me for years.

  “Okay, Bobby. I’d like to start by asking you a question,” she says, instantly switching to the more familiar version of my brand-spanking-new name.

  “Fire away,” I reply, thinking that this sounds like a really mature and worldly thing for me to say and I’m quite proud of myself.

  She smiles a flirtatious smile. Pretty sure.

  “Did you know that Jesus Christ came all the way to America to save your soul?” she asks, opening the book she’s holding.

  “Really? Did he come through New York?” I query. Obviously I haven’t been paying much attention in church.

  She smiles again, and her teeth are so white that I begin to wonder if people suddenly become great-looking like this once they agree to be Morons. Kind of like vampires get a widow’s peak, fangs, and a black cape when they turn into blood-sucking fiends from hell.

  “I’m pretty sure most people came to America through Ellis Island,” I continue. I believe I may be on a roll. “I’m pretty certain my great-grandfather did.”

  She laughs out loud at this and I don’t understand why, but I’m happy to have made her laugh.

  “You’re really sweet, you know that?” she purrs—or at least I imagine she purrs—at me.

  “Jesus came here before there were any Americans. Long before any cities or highways or even McDonald’s.” She seems to think this is funny, but I don’t get the joke. McDonald’s has always been here.

  “There were only the Nephites and the Lamanites. The Lamanites were originally a white-skinned race that God burned because of their terrible sins, turning them into Negroes,” she offers up.

  I interrupt her. Breasts and all. I don’t know much about my fellow Morons yet but I’m pretty sure black people aren’t the color they are because they’ve been set on fire by God. Not that I’m listening, but I guess part of me must be, despite her staggering awesomeness.

  “I know a black kid named Evan and I don’t think his skin is that burned,” I suggest.

  Dracula puts her hand on my thigh, dangerously close to Woody. She just won the argument by default. Sorry, Evan. Woody answers the call. But to be fair, this comely wench could sell binoculars to the blind, life insurance to the dead, and oil to the Arabs. Her hand’s warmth seeps into my skinny upper leg, melting the frosty heart I suppose I have hardened all my life against these wonderful, wonderful people, the Morons.

  “I wish you’d open your heart to Jesus,” she whispers in my ear, but she’s probably not really whispering, nor are her lips anywhere near my ear. But the ear hears what the ear wants to hear, especially when it’s as acoustically superior an ear as mine, and I am sold on being a Moron immediately. We talk for an hour or more, which seems like a minute or less, and then she removes her hand from my fluttering thigh (yes, the little minx has left it there through the whole conversation; she is no dummy) and says they must go but she will see me at her church next Sunday. She leaves her book for me to read, with a personal note inscribed on the frontispiece that drips and reeks of sexual innuendo, I convince myself. Dracula and Bradley leave with one more convert to Moronism as my sweet sister Josie runs to the bathroom to see if she has signs of advanced herpes. She takes a thirty-minute shower, throws up three times, and changes her clothes twice. And I form another deep connection between sex and organized religious fruitcakes! My little thigh still burns from the Moron flirt’s touch, and Woody will spill his beans later that evening with the memory of Dracula’s soft, warm hand still smoldering in his loins. Or certainly close to them. Horatiodamnit!!!

  Bobby

  I am in a corner of the men’s room in the bar. I hit the “answer” button on my glowing cell phone . . .

  “Hey. How’d you like the Chuck Heston thing? Pretty cool, huh?”

  “What . . . ?”

  “What? What? What?!”

  “What . . . ?”

  “Okay, you need to expand your vocabulary.”

  “God?”

  “That’s a neat trick, yes? Did you freak out when you saw it? The white streak? How long before you made The Ten Commandments connection? I love that. You accept this whole ‘movie’ element that if you speak to me, your hair, beard—and possibly pubics—turn white. Hahaha. That’s a little wacky, but I get it. And the white stripe is a nice touch, I think, when you begin to doubt. Which you did. I was hoping you wouldn’t want to start your own church or shave your head or God knows what else.”

  “This is so not what I thought talking to God would be like. You sound like me. Or ‘me’ if I was, I don’t know, in charge and a bit drunk.”

  “But you are in charge.”

  “Well, no, I’m not.”

  “Well, yes, you are.”

  “This is surreal.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “So you’re not mad? You’re not going to send a plague or something to kill me, right? Because I’m doing a little better now.”

  The bathroom is starting to empty at a much faster clip now that the occupants are catching on that I believe I’m actually talking to God about possibly killing me. I try to dial it down a little in intensity and volume. And I drop the surname . . . or Christian name . . . epithet . . . title . . . rank . . . whatever it is.

  “Yes, you are.”

  “And this isn’t some weird guy with a computer program or something that has information he shouldn’t have plus a great relationship with my phone service provider?”

  “What about the ‘Moses’ white-hair thingee?”

  “Okay, okay. I can’t even begin to process that yet.”

  “Have you had anything to drink?”

  “Wouldn’t you know that?”

  “Of course. I wanted to see if you’d try to sneak that one by me. There’s no point in talking to you people when you’ve had too much to drink.”

  “ ‘You people?’ That sounds so . . . I don’t know . . . callous. Like something I would say.”

  “You think?”

  “Where’s the burning bush? And how come you don’t sound all Godlike and imperious and infallible so that when we hear you speak we all just want to drop to our knees and honor and adore you? Really. What the hell?”

  “Adore me? Okay, how’s this . . .”

  The voice in my ear suddenly takes on a rich, sonorous quality. With a crapload of really cheesy echo. I think I detect an angelic choir humming angelically in the background. The whole thing sounds like some half-assed Oral Roberts program.

  “My son!! I am the Lord thy God. Prostrate thyself before me and pay homage to my magnificence, for I am the maker of all things in Heaven and upon the Earth. I demand thy obedience, thy supplication, and thy occasional contributions of hard-earned cash via televangelists with too much hair spray. Fear me!”

  One of the porcelain sinks in the now completely empty restroom explodes into flames, scaring the crap out of me. It burns with a ghostly purple/green fire like nothing I have ever seen before.

  “Holy shit!!!”

  “How’s that? Better for ya? More Godlike?”

  “You’re out of your mind!”

  “Hahahahahahahahahahahaha!”

  “I’m going back to the bar.”

  “I think you need a cup of coffee!”

  The line goes dead. And this time it’s not me ending the call. No wonder we’re all insane. God is, too.

  I pocket my cell phone and exit the bathroom and its blazing sink, at the approximate speed a gazelle leaves the Serengeti at the first whiff of a lioness. And I feel very much like that gazelle right now. I’m beginning to think it was a bad idea to call God in the first place. An exceptionally bad idea. God is apparently quite real, quite crazy, and clearly tracking me now, which prior to this encounter I would have thought either highly unlikely or extremely helpful. Not anymore. The only change to come out of these conversations is that I am
, at the moment, no longer thinking about self-termination. It seems kind of lame to even consider it . . . considering.

  I feel instantly better once I’m amongst mere fellow mortals again. Safety in numbers. Or at least a temporary diversion. I elbow my way to the bar a second time, keeping a wary eye on the ceiling as though I’ll be able to spot a thunderbolt or something equally dubious before it hits me. I don’t even know what I’m running from, or if I can run. It’s time for another drink. God said there’s no point talking to the alcoholically impaired, so maybe if I stay high from now until Christmas God will leave me alone. I probably should say “he” or even “she,” but what’s really strange is that there is no definite sex attached to the voice I’ve heard. That in itself is exceedingly bizarre and so politically correct it makes me want to hurl . . . but it’s true. It’s a kind of androgynous voice, neither wholly male nor wholly female.

  Mr. ’Tude, the bartender from hell, ignores me again even though I have severe desperation and need written all over my face, or maybe he ignores me because of it. I should get out more so I can learn the societal signals. He is actually just watching a basketball game on one of the thousand TVs artfully positioned for mandatory viewing whether you’re into the sports thing or not. While the other bartenders swirl and dart around him, pouring, mixing, and delivering their potent concoctions in a fairly impressive ballet, I am struck by the irony that although I just spoke with God for the second time, I can still resent the fact that this weasel is ignoring me on purpose and I’m not getting a beer when I want it. Evidence, I think, that if the Martians invaded, vaporized our president with a ray gun, and took over the world, we would all accept it in stride and continue to try to win this week’s $25 million Powerball. We are shortsighted pea-brains, all.

  “This guy is one of the reasons people shouldn’t breed,” I say to no one in particular.

  “Spay and neuter them all,” I hear to my left. I turn to face the voice, half expecting to see my sister Josephine. It’s so much something she would say in one of her lighter moments, when her system was relatively free of the psychosis-numbing drugs.