Каарон Уоррен - The Lowest Heaven

“Are you gonna be there?” I asked, before kicking myself for how desperate that made me sound.

Jordan chuckled, and for a second I was sure he’d seen straight through me, then he looked a little sad and shrugged.

“It ain’t like I’ve anyplace else to be,” he said.

“How dumb are you?” My father yelled and waved the leaflet in my face. “Those folk are as crazy as snakes and twice as dangerous.”

Well, at least now I knew for sure that he was going through my things. I wouldn’t be hanging my jacket in the hall again anytime soon.

“Are you done?” I said, recklessly.

“No, I am not done. I will tell you when I am done. And get your hand off your hip,” he said and slapped my arm loose, “What kind of boy are you?”

“Tom!” My mom interjected.

I felt hot shame sting my face. Shame for what my father thought of me, and for my mother’s need to protect me from it. I stalked off to my room not saying another word, and laid low for a couple of hours.

My father and I hadn’t seen eye to eye since, well, since I could walk and talk. You don’t have to wear gold eye shadow for your Pa to know you’re never gonna be a quarterback. And as much as I act like I don’t give a twirly fuck what he thinks about me, it ain’t always easy to live with that look of disappointment on your father’s face.

I waited til I heard the opening music to “Highway to Heaven”, the only TV show my Pa said was worth giving the time of day and snuck out the front door with my sneakers in my hands.

The meeting was in an old plantation house on the outskirts of town. It’d been converted into a luxury holiday home◦– the Flying Saucer People were clearly living in style. I rode out on my bike, abandoning it amongst the wisteria that hung from the trees and veranda. The sun had only just set and the front yard was still warm and full of the noise of crickets and the heavy sweet scent of gardenia. There was the sound of a party coming from the back yard and I followed the veranda around. There were forty or fifty there, more than I had thought, but they were exactly the kind of oddballs, lonely and lost you’d expect.

Jordan was in charge of a small trestle table of refreshments. He’d tied his curls back into a ponytail, and was wearing dungarees that made him look like he was what my grandma would’ve called “slow”. For a horrible moment, he looked like he belonged among the all the other sideshow freaks of Meridian life.

Then he caught sight of me, grinned and waved me over. His smile lit me up like a toy turned on for the first time◦– blazing into action, lights flashing, motor whirring. My heart pounded. A bead of cold sweat was making its way down past the small of my back by the time I got over to him.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hay’s for horses, ass-bite,” I squeaked in a high voice I didn’t recognize. Could I have sounded more like a moron?

“They got me serving juice,” he said, and then lent in conspiratorially, “but I can modify yours.”

He tugged a flask of whiskey from the inside of his pants.

“I’m good,” I said and took a sip of juice. My folks don’t allow alcohol in the house and the unpopular girls I hang out with don’t go near it. Hooch ain’t so big in Bible Study. While I was pretty sure I wouldn’t go crazy after one glass, uninhibited was the last thing I could risk feeling around Jordan Danes.

Someone called the meeting to a start. Jordan touched my arm as he guided me over towards a makeshift stage in the back yard, where a well-dressed couple was preparing to address the human detritus. The warmth of his hand left an impression long after it was gone. I could feel the memory of his fingertips against my skin.

Carlton Ray and his wife didn’t look like UFO freaks, more like TV evangelists, but they sure knew how to work a crowd. He was maybe fifty, with broad shoulders and a wry smile that somehow made you feel he knew what you were thinking. His wife was an off the shelf Southern Belle, with a huge, immobile hairdo and shoulder pads that made her as broad as her husband. She glowed with confidence and a salon tan.

“You may be wondering why you’re here,” Carlton Ray announced to the weirdoes, who inched forward, anxious for the answer. “Well I ain’t gonna make your life easy for you and tell you. I want you to search deep inside yourself for the answer to that question. Why aren’t you out in the world◦– living, loving, succeeding? Why is it you feel you fit no place at all?”

Carlton turned his attention to me, “you got an answer for me, son?”

I was so surprised by him addressing me directly I froze and looked away.

“You think you’re out of step with the world? Well I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong, it’s the world that’s lost its footing and lost its way. The solution is not in the size of your paycheck or the car you drive. A few of you are wise souls, sensitive enough to know this◦– and that is why you’re here.

“What can we do? How do we turn back the tide and get the human race back on course? I have bad news for you. We can’t. There is no hope for them. They have de-evolved into selfishness and selfism.

“But there is help for us . You are here because you are still on the true path. You are still evolving. I have good news. Those of us still alive to generosity of spirit, those of us desiring a simple, unselfish connection to another person have a way out.”

He looked to the heavens. “Above us a comet is heading towards the Earth. A thousand tons of stone, a three hundred mile cloud of dust and ice in its wake. Zooming past the Earth to be flung around the sun and back out into the farthest recesses of the solar system. But hidden in the comet’s tail is our way out. A space ship is there, avoiding detection from NASA and the CIA. Slipping into the solar system without any scientist or politician being any the wiser. As I speak to you, Zedekiah is piloting his ship, dodging the chunks of rock and glaciers of ice that break away from the comet. He’s travelled light years. He’s coming. He’s coming for us.”

I had to stop myself from laughing. The idea of a spaceman playing Asteroids in a comet’s tail was so much bullshit. I smirked and turned to Jordan to make a joke, expecting to see my expression reflected on his face, but he was staring at the night sky, tears in the corners of his perfect brown eyes.

Afterwards, we retreated to a peeling white swing chair on the veranda, which creaked ominously beneath our weight. I leant forward and blocked Jordan from view as he rolled a joint on the sly. He palmed it like a conjurer when Carlton and his wife came over, and winked conspiratorially at me.

“Evening Jordan, I see you’ve found yourself a friend.”

Jordan introduced me and I shook Carlton’s large, warm hand. He had a grip like a vice.

“Good to meet you son,” he said, and looked me right in the eye, “Are you ready for the ascension?”

“No sir.”

“Oh, and why is that?”

“Well to start with, Halley’s Comet may travel at one hundred and fifty thousand miles per hour, but it still takes seventy-six years to orbit the sun. Your friend Zebedee is going be very old or very dead by the time he gets here.”

Carlton just laughed. “Well, we have a real live wire here, don’t we?”

“Just saying,” I shrugged ungraciously.

Carlton ruffled my hair like I was a Shih Tzu. “Well you don’t seem to find any hardship fitting in on Planet Earth, no need for Jordan here to save you a place next to him on Zedekiah’s ship.”

“No sir,” I said, feeling an inexplicable pang of loss. If there was a seat next to Jordan, I wanted to be sitting in it, even if it and the flying saucer it were attached to were so much baloney.