Kyle Minor - Praying Drunk

By one way of thinking, we’ve entered into a cold intellectual exercise of technical cause-and-effect, which couldn’t be any more distant from the story of a flesh-and-blood man who wore a mustache his entire adult life, who never felt comfortable in a suit, whose smile was crooked after the accident, whose voice was believed by his nephews to be unsettling and weird. We’re laying blame and skipping all the important stuff, like how it seemed the last time we saw him that he was finally turning it around, that this woman he was with was a good thing. She was a jeweler. He had bought a house. Together they were buying a commercial building. You could see a future where she joined him on the cross-country road rallies he occasionally raced. In time you could see him becoming a man who didn’t complain about losing the love of his ex-wife and his children every two or three hours. You could foresee a big-screen television in the living room, a big black leather sofa, satellite channels, the premium package with the college football games from the western states and Formula One auto racing from Europe and Brazil. You could see that the ring he had bought her would soon enough be on her finger where he wanted it instead of in her purse where she could think about it. You could see her negotiating with herself over time, talking herself into marrying him. That was why they were so often coming to visit my parents’ house in the months before he died, no doubt about it. She was willing him a close-knit family so she could join it.

At the funeral, somebody said what always gets said, which is all things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are called according to His righteousness. And I wondered, if the story started there — because that’s the classic In the beginning scenario — what did that say about a God with agency sufficient to create everything and set it into motion, and apathy enough to let it proceed as an atrocity parade?

Or what does it say about me, the god of this telling, that I have to take it to these dark places? Because it is within my power to do what I now want to do, which is to start the story with the more pleasing trouble Henry James prescribed — the trouble of he and she, and how they met, and how he toured her jewelry shop, and how she showed him how to shape a ring, set a precious stone, finish a setting, display the thing under glass, move a delicate hand in the direction of the display case, match a ring to a finger, watch a man and woman walk away wearing the symbols of their love. And couldn’t I end it somewhere in the world of promise, he and she beside a lake somewhere, he opening the box, showing her the ring he had commissioned for her, he being sure to seek out the finest jewelry maker in town, knowing her discerning taste, and she saying she approved, the ring was lovely as the man is lovely, turning to him, kissing him, saying not today and not tomorrow, but there will come a day, I feel it, I believe it, something good is in our future?

I AM DEEPLY, DEEPLY AFRAID. Subtract seventeen years from my twenty-nine. I am twelve years old, standing beneath a starfruit tree, standing on an asphalt path lined with banyan trees, their roots extending from ground to sky to ground again and forming great pockets of wild, empty space in the center of their root-branches. Fifty feet behind me, the science laboratories where my chemistry teacher last week was too careless with sodium and set the ceiling tiles on fire. Fifty feet in front, the band room where the Sonshine Fellowship (Get it? Son, not sun! Like Jesus, the Son of God, the Light of the World who takes away our sins!) meets every Wednesday morning at 6:30 to pray and sing the happiest of songs all in major keys, except the songs borrowed from the Jews, which are in minor keys and which speed up as they go along and which, when played on acoustic guitars, are faintly reminiscent of sad country songs. And those happy songs make me happy, truly happy, for brief and ever briefer periods of time, but it’s those Jewish songs— You shall go out with joy and be led forth with peace. The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you. . — that really slay me, because there is something earned about that joy; it has come from a place of great pain.

The Jews, of course, are going to hell, but, as we students are constantly reminded, Jesus was a Jew, and the Jews are God’s chosen people, and in fact we must keep the Jews around — this is the real reason why the Holocaust was so awful, because it was the work of the devil to destroy God’s plan for the end of the world, which goes like this: Christ comes back in the clouds, this time on a white horse and bearing a sword, and bodily raptures all the dead in Him — a veritable zombie army — and the living Christians, too, the true ones (not, for instance, the Catholics, who follow a man, the pope; and not, for instance, the Episcopalians, who have placed a premium on the material needs of people rather than their spiritual needs — the Social Gospel, this is called — and so have slipped into heresy). The Christians, living and dead, taken bodily from the earth, leave a void of darkness. Remember, in the Book of Genesis, God promised to save the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah if Lot could find even one righteous man, but none could be found, so God rained fire upon the cities and they were destroyed. This, too, will be the fate of the earth, now that the righteous are gone. The Antichrist has already begun his seven-year reign. The clock is ticking. But — wait! — in that last hour 144,000 Jews finally accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior, many of them convinced and converted by two resurrected Jewish prophets. And then the Jews fight alongside the returning army of Christians at the battle of Armageddon, which takes place right in the heart of contemporary Palestine. God’s chosen people, old and new, are finally reunited, and live together in the new heaven and the new earth — in the very bosom of God — forever.

But that’s not why I am drawn to the Jews and their songs. It’s not that I don’t care about the rapture and Armageddon and the end of time. I am extremely anxious about it. For the last eight years — for as long, that is to say, as I have had memory — I have knelt in my bed, beside my window, at dusk, and watched the light show of sunset, looking for the crimson bloodstain in the sky that I’ve been told is a sign of His coming. I have memorized Scriptures— If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us of all unrighteousness —and I live in fear of unforgiveness, of eternal hellfire, so I am constantly confessing my sins, an ongoing litany, a conversation, perhaps one-sided, between me and God, that consists for the most part of me trying to recount every sinful action (that part is easy) and every sinful thought (that part is hard). To look upon a woman with lust in your heart, for example, is the same as having slept with her. I am twelve years old. I am hard pressed to find a woman upon whom I will be able to gaze without feeling a twinge of lust in my heart. Puberty has come slow — my classmates, staring at my tiny naked body in the shower after Physical Education class, have made it quite clear that I am deficient in this area of puberty-arrival. But not entirely deficient. Sixth-period history: I am sitting behind Jenny Glass. Her blonde hair down to her shoulders, the shape of her hips, the sound of her voice humming softly, soft enough that Mr. Sanders can’t hear, but loud enough that I can hear how fully rendered each of her notes, even at so soft a volume, such control. . and then I’m wondering what it would be like to be married to her, and would we share a bed? and what would that be like? and I don’t really know exactly what all that means — I mean, I know that there are parts, and that they fit, that kind of thing — but what I’m really thinking about is what it would be like to kiss Jenny Glass, to touch her hair as we kiss, feel it in the webbings of my fingers. . and my body responds to these thoughts in its new way, and I lean forward a little in the desk, to obscure whatever it is that is happening, but of course it is at this moment that Mr. Sanders has had his say about the Battle of the Spanish Armada and is ready for me to have mine. “Kyle?” he says, and I say, “1588,” and he says no, it’s not enough to just know the date. You have to trace the sea routes on the four-color pulldown map, which he is right this moment pulling down over the chalkboard. Come on up, is what he says. And, right then, I do something that I’ve seen other people do but have never myself done. I say no, I’m not coming to the board to trace the sea routes on the four-color pulldown map. He asks why, and I say I’m not particularly interested in sea routes, that in fact I prefer dates and that I’m tired of being made to do things that I do not want to do. Mr. Sanders says if I don’t walk directly to the blackboard and trace the sea routes that I will get a zero for the day’s participation grade and that I’ll be in grave danger of making him very angry. I consult my pants. My pants are saying no. Jenny Glass has turned around to look at me now, incredulous — the first opportunity, in fact, I’ve found to use that word, incredulous; I’ve been wanting to use it for a very long time, but now, employing it in my own mind, the word incredulous is nowhere near as sweet as I had thought it might be — and I briefly look at Jenny, trying to gauge her reaction to this turn of events, but I find that I am not able to look her in the eye. A slow, painful moment passes. Then, for the first time in my life, I deploy a coping skill that will soon become a lifelong crutch (and will also give those who wish for one a reason not to like me). I feign confidence. I say, “Mr. Sanders,” and he says, “Yes?” and I borrow a line from a television comedian: “I’ll take the zero.”