Desperation (18 page)

No answer from the voice.

Distant, distant, he heard the sound of the firehouse whistle over on Columbus Broad. It was five o'clock. He had been sitting up on the platform with his eyes closed for at least an hour, probably more like two. His mom and dad would have noticed he was no longer in the driveway, would have seen the ball lying in the grass, would be worried. He loved them and didn't want to worry them—on some level he understood that Brian's impending death had struck at them as hard as it had struck at him—but he couldn't go home yet. Because he wasn't
done
yet.

Do you want me to pray?
he asked the voice.
I'll try if you want me to, but I don't know how—we don't go to church, and—

The voice overrode his, not angry, not amused, not impatient, not
anything
he could read.
You're praying already,
it said.

What should I pray for?

Oh shit, the mummy's after us,
the voice said.
Let's all walk a little faster.

I don't know what that means.

Yes you do.

No I don't!

“Yes I do,” he said, almost moaned. “Yes I do, it means ask for what none of them dare to ask for, pray for what none of them dare to pray for. Is that it?”

No answer from the voice.

David opened his eyes and the afternoon bombed him with late light, the red-gold glow of November. His legs were numb from the knees down, and he felt as if he had just awakened from a deep sleep. The day's simple unzipped loveliness stunned him, and for a moment he was very aware of himself as a part of something whole—a cell on the living skin of the world. He lifted his hands from his knees, turned them over, and held them out.

“Make him better,” he said. “God, make him better. If you do, I'll do something for you. I'll listen for what you want, and then I'll do it. I promise.”

He didn't close his eyes but listened carefully, waiting to see if the voice had anything more to say. At first it seemed it did not. He lowered his hands, started to stand up, then winced at the burst of pins and needles that went whooshing up his legs from the balls of his feet. He even laughed a little. He grabbed a branch to steady himself, and as he was doing this, the voice
did
speak again.

David listened, head cocked, still holding the branch, still feeling his muscles tingle crazily as the blood worked its way back into them. Then he nodded. They had put three nails into the trunk of the tree to hold the
VIET CONG LOOKOUT
sign. The wood had shrunk and warped since then, and the rusty heads of the nails stuck out. David took the blue pass with
EXCUSED EARLY
printed on it from his shirt pocket and poked it onto one of the nailheads. That done, he marched in place until the tingling in his legs began to subside and he trusted himself to climb back down the tree.

He went home. He hadn't even gotten to the driveway before his parents were out the kitchen door. Ellen Carver stood on the stoop, hand raised to her forehead to shade her eyes, while Ralph almost ran down to the sidewalk to meet him and grab him by the shoulders.

“Where were you? Where in hell
were
you, David?”

“I went for a walk. Into the Bear Street Woods. I was thinking about Brian.”

“Well, you scared the devil out of us,” his mom said. Kirsten joined her on the stoop. She was eating a bowl of Jell-O and had her favorite doll, Melissa Sweetheart, tucked under her arm. “Even Kirstie was worried, weren't you?”

“Nope,” Pie said, and went on eating her Jell-O.

“Are you all right?” his father had asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

He went into the house, yanking on one of Pie's braids as he went past her. Pie wrinkled her nose at him, then smiled.

“Supper's almost ready, go wash up,” Ellen said.

The telephone started to ring. She went to answer it, then called sharply to David as he headed for the downstairs bathroom to wash his hands, which
had
been pretty dirty—sticky, sappy, treeclimbing dirty. He turned and saw his mom holding out the telephone in one fist while she twisted the other restlessly in her apron. She tried to talk, but at first no sound came out when her lips moved. She swallowed and tried again. “It's Debbie Ross, for you. She's crying. I think it must be over. For God's sake be kind to her.”

David crossed the room and took the phone. That feeling of otherness had swept over him again. He had been sure his mom was at least half-right:
something
was over.

“Hello?” he said. “Mrs. Ross?”

She was crying so hard that at first she couldn't talk. She tried, but what came through her sobs was just
wahh-wahh-wahh.
From a little distance he heard Mr. Ross say, “Let me do it,” and Mrs. Ross said, “No, I'm okay.” There was a mighty honk in David's ear—it sounded like a hungry goose—and then she said: “Brian's awake.”

“Is he?” David said. What she had just said made him feel happier than he had ever been in his life . . . and yet it had not surprised him at all.

Is he dead?
Ellen was mouthing at him. One hand was still plunged deep in her apron, twisting and turning.

“No,” David said, putting his hand over the mouthpiece to talk to his mother and father. It was all right, he could do that; Debbie Ross was sobbing again. He thought she'd do that every time she told anyone, at least for awhile. She wouldn't be able to help it, because her heart had given him up.

Is he dead?
Ellen mouthed again.

“No!”
he told her, a little irritated—it was like she was deaf. “Not dead, alive. She says he's awake.”

His mother and father gaped like fish in an aquarium. Pie went past them, still eating Jell-O, her face turned down to the face of her doll, which was sticking stiffly out from the crook of her arm. “Told you this would happen,” she said to Melissa Sweetheart in a forbidding this-closes-the-discussion tone of voice. “Didn't I say so?”

“Awake,” David's mother had said in a stunned, musing voice.
“Alive.”

“David, are you there?” Mrs. Ross asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Right here.”

“About twenty minutes after you left, the EEG monitor started to show waves. I saw them first—Mark was down in the caff, getting sodas—and I went to the nurses' station. They didn't believe me.” She laughed through her tears. “Well, of course, who would? And when I finally got someone to come look, they called maintenance instead of a doctor, that's how sure they were that it couldn't be happening. They actually
replaced the monitor,
isn't that the most amazing thing you ever heard?”

“Yes,” David said. “Wild.”

Both parents were mouthing at him now, and his dad was also making big hand-gestures. To David he looked like an insane-asylum inmate who thought he was a gameshow host. That made him want to laugh. He didn't want to do that while he was on the phone, Mrs. Ross wouldn't understand, so he turned and faced the wall.

“It wasn't until they saw the same high waves on the new monitor—only even stronger—that one of the nurses called Dr. Waslewski. He's the neurologist. Before he got here, Brian opened his eyes and looked around at us. He asked me if I'd fed the goldfish today. I said yes, the goldfish were fine. I didn't cry or anything. I was too
stunned
to cry. Then he said his head ached and closed his eyes again. When Dr. Waslewski came in, Brian looked like he was still in the coma, and I saw him give the nurse a look, like ‘Why do you bother me with this?' You know?”

“Sure,” David said.

“But when the doctor clapped his hands beside Brian's ear, he opened his eyes again right away. You should have seen that old Polack's face, Davey!” She laughed—the cracked, cackling laugh of a madwoman. “Then . . . then Brian suh-suh-said he was thirsty, and asked if h-he could have a drink of wuh-wuh-
water.
”

She broke down entirely then, her sobs so loud in his ear that they almost hurt. Then they faded and Bri's dad said, “David? You still there?” He sounded none too steady himself, but he wasn't outright bawling, which was a relief.

“Sure.”

“Brian doesn't remember the accident, doesn't remember
anything
after doing his homework in his room the night before it happened, but he remembers his name, and his address, and
our
names. He knows who the President is, and he can do simple math problems. Dr. Waslewski says he's heard of cases like this, but never actually seen one. He called it ‘a clinical miracle.' I don't know if that actually means anything or if it's just something he's always wanted to say, and I don't care. I just want to thank you, David. So does Debbie. From the bottom of our hearts.”

“Me?”
David asked. A hand was tugging his shoulder, trying to get him to turn around. He resisted it. “What are you thanking
me
for?”

“For bringing Brian back to us. You were talking to him; the waves started showing up just after you left. He heard you, Davey. He heard you and came back.”

“It wasn't me,” David said. He turned around. His folks were all but looming over him, their faces frantic with hope, amazement, confusion. His mother was crying. What a day for tears it had been! Only Pie, who usually bawled at least six hours out of every twenty-four, seemed to have her shit together.

“I know what I know,” Mr. Ross said. “I know what I know, David.”

He had to talk to his parents before they stared at him so hard they set his shirt on fire . . . but before he did, there was one other thing he had to know. “What time did he wake up and ask about his goldfish? How long after you started seeing his brainwaves?”

“Well, they changed the monitor . . . she told you that . . . and then . . . I don't know . . .” He trailed off for a moment, then said: “Yes I do. I remember hearing the Columbus Broad fire-whistle just before everything happened. So it must've been a few minutes past five.”

David had nodded, unsurprised. Right around the time the voice in his head had told him
You're praying already.
“Can I come and see him tomorrow?”

Mr. Ross had laughed then. “David, you can come see him at
midnight,
if that's what you want. Why not? Dr. Waslewski says we have to keep waking him up, anyway, and asking him stupid questions. I know what he's afraid of—that Brian will slip back into the coma—but I don't think that's going to happen, do you?”

“Nope,” David said. “Bye, Mr. Ross.”

He'd hung up the telephone then, and his parents all but pounced on him.
How did it happen?
they wanted to know.
How did it happen, and what do they think
you
had to do with it?

David felt an urge then—an amazingly strong one—to cast his eyes down modestly and say,
Well, he woke up, that's really all I know. Except . . . well
 . . . He would pause with seeming reluctance, then add:
Mr. and Mrs. Ross think he might have heard my voice and responded to it, but you know how upset they've been.
That's all it would take to start a legend; part of him knew it. And he wanted to do it.

Part of him really, really wanted to do it.

It wasn't the strange inside-out voice that stopped him but a thought of his own, one that was more intuited than articulated:
If you take the credit, it stops here.

What stops?

Everything that matters,
the voice of intuition responded.
Everything that matters.

“David, come
on,
” his father said, giving his shoulders a little shake. “We're
dying
here.”

“Brian's awake,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “He can talk, he can remember. The brain-guy says it's a miracle. Mr. and Mrs. Ross think I had something to do with it, that he heard me talking to him and came back, but nothing like that happened. I was holding his hand, and he wasn't there. He was the most gone person I ever saw in my life. That's why I cried—not because his folks were having a fit but because he was gone. I don't know what happened, and I don't care. He's awake, that's all I care about.”

“That's all you
need
to care about, darling,” his mother said, and gave him a brief, hard hug.

“I'm hungry,” he said. “What's for supper?”

3

Now he hung
in the
black, blind but not deaf, listening for the voice, the one Reverend Gene Martin called the still, small voice of God. Reverend Martin had listened carefully to David's story not once but many times over the last seven months, and he seemed especially pleased by David's recounting of how he had felt during the conversation with his parents after he had finished talking with Mr. Ross.

“You were completely correct,” Reverend Martin had said. “It
wasn't
another voice you heard at the end, especially not the voice of God . . . except in the sense that God always speaks to us through our consciences. Secular people, David, believe that the conscience is only a kind of censor, a place where social sanctions are stored, but in fact it is itself a kind of outsider, often guiding us to good solutions even in situations far beyond our understanding. Do you follow me?”

“I think so.”

“You didn't know
why
it was wrong to take the credit for your friend's recovery, but you didn't need to. Satan tempted you as he tempted Moses, but in this case you did what Moses didn't, or couldn't: first
understood,
then
with
stood.”

“What about Moses? What did he do?”

Reverend Martin told him the story of how, when the Israelites he'd led out of Egypt were thirsty, Moses had struck a stone with Aaron's staff and brought water gushing out of it. And when the Israelites asked to whom their thanks should be directed, Moses said they could thank him. Reverend Martin sipped from a teacup with
HAPPY, JOYOUS, AND FREE
printed on the side as he told this story, but what was in the cup didn't exactly smell like tea to David. It smelled more like the whiskey his dad sometimes drank while watching the late news.

“Just one little misstep in a long, hardworking life in the service of the Lord,” Reverend Martin said cheerfully, “but God kept him out of the Promised Land for it. Joshua led em across the river—nasty, ungrateful bunch that they were.”

This conversation had taken place on a Sunday afternoon in June. By then the two of them had known each other for quite awhile, and grown comfortable with each other. David had fallen into the habit of going to church in the morning, then walking over to the Methodist parsonage on Sunday afternoon and talking with Reverend Martin for an hour or so in his study. David looked forward to these meetings, and Gene Martin did, too. He was immensely taken with the child, who seemed at one moment an ordinary boy and at the next someone much older than his years. And there was something else: he believed that David Carver had been touched by God, and that God's touch might not yet have departed.

He was fascinated with the story of Brian Ross, and by how what had happened to Brian had caused David, a perfect late-twentieth-century religious illiterate, to seek answers . . . to seek God. He told his wife that David was the only honest convert he had ever seen, and that what had happened to David's friend was the only modern miracle he'd ever heard of that he could actually believe in. Brian had turned out fine and dandy except for a slight limp, and the doctors said even that might be gone in a year or so.

“Marvellous,” Stella Martin replied. “That will be a comfort to me and the baby if your young friend says the wrong thing about his religious instruction and you wind up in court, facing child-abuse charges. You have to be careful, Gene—and you're
crazy
to be drinking around him.”

“I'm
not
drinking around him,” Reverend Martin had replied, suddenly finding something interesting to look at out the window. At last he had returned his eyes to his wife. “As to the other, the Lord is my shepherd.”

He went on seeing David on Sunday afternoons. He was not quite thirty himself, and discovering for the first time the pleasures of writing on a perfectly blank slate. He didn't quit mixing Seagram's with his tea, a Sunday-afternoon tradition of long standing, but he left the study door open whenever he and David were together. The TV was always on during their conversations, always punched to Mute and tuned to the various Sunday-afternoon athletic contests—soundless football when David first came to Reverend Martin, then soundless basketball, then soundless baseball.

It was during a soundless baseball game between the Indians and the A's that David sat mulling over the story of Moses and the water from the rock. After awhile he looked up from the TV screen and said: “God isn't very forgiving, is he?”

“Yes, indeed he
is,
” Reverend Martin said, sounding a little surprised. “He
has
to be, because he is so demanding.”

“But he's cruel, too—isn't he?”

Gene Martin hadn't hesitated. “Yes,” he said. “God is cruel. I have popcorn, David—would you like me to make some?”

Now he floated in the black, listening for Reverend Martin's cruel God, the one who had refused Moses entry into Canaan because Moses had one single time claimed God's work as his own, the one who had used him in some fashion to save Brian Ross, the one who had then killed his sweet little sister and put the rest of them in the hands of a giant lunatic who had the empty eyes of a coma patient.

There were other voices in the dark place where he went when he prayed; he heard them frequently while he was there—usually distant, like the dim voices you sometimes heard in the background when you made a long-distance call, sometimes more clearly. Today one of them was very clear, indeed.

If you want to pray, pray to me,
it said.
Why would you pray to a God who kills baby sisters? You'll never laugh at how funny she is again, or tickle her until she squeals, or pull her braids. She's dead and you and your folks are in jail. When he comes back, the crazy cop, he'll probably kill all three of you. The others as well. This is what your God did, and really, what else would you expect from a God who kills baby sisters? He's as crazy as the cop, when you get right down to cases. Yet you kneel before him. Come on, Davey, get a life. Get a
grip.
Pray to me. At least I'm not
crazy.

He wasn't rocked by this voice—not very, anyway. He'd heard it before, perhaps first wrapped inside that strong impulse to give his folks the impression that he had called Brian back from the deep reaches of his coma. He heard it more clearly, more
personally,
during his daily prayers, and this had troubled him, but when he told Reverend Martin about how that voice would sometimes cut in as if it were on a telephone extension, Reverend Martin had only laughed. “Like God, Satan tends to speak to us most clearly in our prayers and meditations,” he said. “It's when we're most open, most in touch with our
pneuma.
”

“
Pneuma?
What's that?”

“Spirit. The part of you that yearns to fulfill its God-made potential and be eternal. The part that God and Satan are squabbling over even now.”

He had taught David a little mantra to use at such times, and he used it now.
See in me, be in me,
he thought, over and over again. He was waiting for the voice of the other to fade, but he also needed to get above the pain again. It kept coming back like cramps. Thinking about what had happened to Pie hurt so
deep.
And yes, he
did
resent God for letting the insane cop push her down those stairs. Resented, hell,
hated.

See in me, God. Be in me, God. See in me, be in me.

The voice of Satan (if it was indeed him; David didn't know for sure) faded away, and for awhile there was only the dark.

Tell me what to do, God. Tell me what you want. And if it's your will that we should die here, help me not to waste time being mad or being scared or yelling for an explanation.

Distant, the howl of a coyote. Then, nothing.

He waited, trying to stay open, and still there was nothing. At last he gave up and spoke the prayer-ending words that Reverend Martin had taught him, muttering them into his clasped hands: “Lord, make me be useful to myself and help me to remember that until I am, I can't be useful to others. Help me to remember that you are my creator. I am what you made—sometimes the thumb on your hand, sometimes the tongue in your mouth. Make me a vessel which is whole to your service. Thanks. Amen.”

He opened his eyes. As always, he first stared into the darkness in the center of his clasped hands, and as always, the first thing it reminded him of was an eye—a hole like an eye. Whose, though? God's? The devil's? Perhaps just his own?

He stood up, turned slowly around, looked at his parents. They were looking back at him, Ellie amazed, Ralph grave.

“Well thank
heaven,
” his mother said. She gave him a chance to reply, and when he didn't she asked: “
Were
you praying? You were down on your knees almost half an hour, I thought you must have gone to sleep,
were
you praying?”

“Yes.”

“Do you do it all the time, or is this a special case?”

“I do it three times a day. In the morning, at night, and once somewhere in the middle. The middle one I use to say thanks for the good things in my life and ask for help with the stuff I don't understand.” He laughed—a small, nervous sound. “There's always plenty of that.”

“Is this a recent development, or have you been doing it since you started going to that church?” She was still looking at him with a perplexity that made David feel self-conscious. Part of it was the black eye—she was developing a hell of shiner from where the cop had hit her—but that wasn't all of it, or even most of it. She was looking at him as if she had never seen him before.

“He's been doing it since Brian's accident,” Ralph said. He touched the swollen place over his left eye, winced, and dropped his hand again. He stared at David through two sets of bars, looking as self-conscious as David felt. “I came upstairs to kiss you goodnight this one time—it was a few days after they let Brian go home—and I saw you down on your knees at the foot of your bed. At first I thought you might be . . . well, I don't know, doing something else . . . then I heard some of what you were saying, and understood.”

David smiled, feeling a blush heat his cheeks. That was pretty absurd, under the circumstances, but there it was. “I do it in my head now. I don't even move my lips. A couple of kids heard me mumbling to myself one day in study-hall and thought I was going feeble.”

“Maybe your father understands, but I don't,” Ellen said.

“I talk to God,” he said. This was embarrassing, but maybe if it was said once, and right out straight, it wouldn't have to be said again. “That's what praying is, talking to God. At first it feels like talking to yourself, but then it changes.”

“Is that something you know for yourself, David, or is it something your new Sunday pal told you?”

“Something I know for myself.”

“And does God answer?”

“Sometimes I think I hear him,” David said. He reached into his pocket and touched the shotgun shell with the tips of his fingers. “And once I know I did. I asked him to let Brian be all right. After Dad took me to the hospital, I went to the Bear Street Woods and climbed to the platform me and Bri made in a tree there and asked God to let him be all right. I said that if he did that, I'd kind of give him an IOU. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes, David, I know what an IOU is. And has he collected on it? This God of yours?”

“Not yet. But when I got up to climb back down the tree, God told me to put my
EXCUSED EARLY
pass on a nail that was sticking out of the bark up there. It was like he wanted me to turn it in, only to him instead of Mrs. Hardy in the office. And something else. He wanted me to find out as much as I could about him—what he is, what he wants, what he does, and what he won't do. I didn't exactly hear that in words, but I heard the name of the man he wanted me to go to—Reverend Martin. That's why I go to the Methodist church. I don't think the brand name matters much to God, though. He just said to do church for my heart and spirit, and Reverend Martin for my mind. I didn't even know who Reverend Martin was at first.”

“But you
did,
” Ellie Carver said. She spoke in the soft, soothing voice of a person who suddenly understands that the person she's talking with is having mental problems. “Gene Martin has come to the house two or three years in a row to collect for African Relief.”

“Really? I didn't see him. I guess I must have been in school when he came.”

“Nonsense,” his mother said, now in tones of absolute finality. “He would have come around near Christmas, so you wouldn't have been in school. Now listen to me, David. Very carefully. When the stuff with Brian happened, you must have . . . well, I don't know . . . thought you needed outside help. And your subconscious dredged up the only name it knew. The God you heard in your moment of bereavement was your subconscious mind, looking for answers.” She turned to Ralph and spread her hands. “The obsessive Bible-reading was bad enough, but
this
 . . . why didn't you tell me about this praying business?”

“Because it looked private.” He shrugged, not meeting her eyes. “And it wasn't hurting anybody.”

“Oh no, praying is great, without it the thumbscrews and the Iron Maiden probably never would have been invented.” This was a voice David had heard before, a nervous, hectoring voice that his mother adopted when she was trying to keep from breaking down completely. It was the way she'd spoken to him and his dad when Brian had been in the hospital; she had gone on in that vein for a week or so even after Brian came around.

David's father turned away from her, stuffing his hands in his pockets and looking nervously down at the floor. That seemed to make her more furious than ever. She swung back to David, mouth working, eyes shiny with new tears.