Your Body is Changing (10 page)

The devil slapped a picture of Laura Prepon into Henry’s head to get him off track so he couldn’t concentrate on the Word of the Lord.

Laura Prepon, the actress who portrayed the redheaded girl on That ’70s Show, had gone on Conan O’Brien to talk about shooting a movie in Alabama. When she said Alabama something happened in Henry’s pants. Where in Alabama? Was she coming back? Why was the world keeping them apart? Oh, Laura Prepon, you have the wide enticing face of a beauteous harlot. You have a vulva like a velvet boat.

It was eye-opening to be in Alabama. It was educational to find out that people could be so different, said Laura Prepon. One person from Alabama had tried to fashion a welcome sign for her as a gesture of goodwill, but this Alabama person did not go about his task properly. The sign was crudely constructed, which gave Laura Prepon a window into Alabama’s soul, as she explained to Conan O’Brien. Alabama people did not know how to make neat, orderly signs, unlike the rest of the country. Another creepy person from Alabama actually tried to touch her in a coffee shop. Laura Prepon did not know how she managed to stay in Alabama for almost two weeks.

Henry wished that one day he would see Laura Prepon walking through a restaurant with everyone paying attention to her because she was a star of liberal Hollywood. Then he would stick out his foot real casual and trip her, not so she’d get hurt but just embarrassed and everybody would laugh at her so she would know what it felt like. Then he would help her up and reassure her that people are people wherever you go. “For man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.” Then he would insert his penis into her naked vagina and make a baby, her white legs wrapped all the way around him, legs just about as white as raw chicken legs.

But that was not the way he thought of Polly Finch. He wanted to hug Polly Finch respectfully and tell her everything was okay and lick the inside of her mouth with his tongue.

Poor Polly Finch! Minding her own business! And then she had spotted the innocent Chinese baby walking toward the methamphetamine lab in Upstate New York. Just as she tossed the baby out of the way into a soft bush everything blew up. Now she was paralyzed from the neck down and also from the neck up, and mercifully asleep in a coma, but they thought she could understand what people were saying. One time somebody had said something sad about Jesus and a tear had trickled out of her paralyzed eye! Another time the President had called her on the telephone and told her that it turned out those methamphetamine people had been sending money overseas for terrorism and he thanked her on behalf of the United States for bringing everything out in the clear sunshine of truth, and while he was saying it one side of her paralyzed mouth went up in a smile. There were several witnesses! She was the Miracle Girl of Upstate New York and a warning to terrorists of all stripes that you can’t get the American people down. There was that one home video where she was drinking punch in the weeks before the tragedy, they showed it on the news every night and she stuck out her tongue and it was all red, bright red, as red as Kool-Aid! It was a famous image that had turned her into America’s favorite paralyzed sweetheart and caused Henry to fall in love, even though she was nineteen years old and already out of high school and paralyzed all over.

Henry remembered that he was in the chapel, looking at the back of Amy Middleton’s neck, so much like Polly Finch’s neck, and the whitish hairs creeping up it, shaped like an arrow, darkening as they climbed. If you lifted up Polly Finch’s long hair that smelled like apple shampoo to give her her special hospital bath you would see something like that underneath. Or if her beautiful hair was all bunched up in her special headgear that she wore for paralysis. He’d like to blow on the back of Amy Middleton’s neck and watch the hairs wave like a pasture of tall grass. All at once his lips got so dry he could feel them cracking. One time Amy Middleton had walked by him after softball in her red shorts and he had caught a waft of something that smelled like a hot ironing board and made him dizzy.

These were wrong thoughts for chapel. What if Henry was a sociopath, like on A&E? Normal on the outside but tortured by wrong thoughts. What about voices in your head? Wasn’t a thought just a voice in your head? Sociopath was really just a politically correct way to say “the devil.” Henry shook his head to rattle the wrong thoughts loose. It worked. The evangelist was saying:

“One evening at a state fair I came into my employer’s luxurious trailer and found him crying his eyes out. Yes, this very same man with the world at his feet! I was stunned and flabbergasted. In my estimation at the time, he was infinitely my superior. I could not imagine why a person of such lofty attainments would ever need to shed a tear, and I told him as much, for we were as close as brothers in our way. This man gestured wearily between his wrenching sobs at his thousand-dollar monkey and his empty liquor bottles and the crumpled pornography that littered the filthy hole he called his home. ‘Sam,’ he said to me, ‘all of this means nothing. I believe it is time for us to get right with the Lord.’ And the name of that man was…Neil Sedaka. Who amongst you is familiar with Neil Sedaka?”

No one was familiar with Neil Sedaka.

“Calendar Girl?” said the evangelist. “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do?”

He was an old man with deep red wrinkles and blinding white needles of hair and nobody knew what he was talking about.

There was a time before the evangelist had been saved when he partook of mind-blowing drugs and toured with a band. They had “crashed” at a Catholic’s house because there was nowhere else to stay. The evangelist had sprung awake in the dead of night with two searing pinholes of pain in his back. Well, it turned out there was a crucifix attached to the wall and the bloody tortured Christ was boring into the evangelist’s back with little lasers coming out of the scrunched-up pain-filled eyes in His twisted face.

That was an interesting story. It made Henry feel weird and excited, like when the man with the motorcycle had jumped over trashcans for the Lord or when the fat man had lain there with cinderblocks on his stomach and somebody had smashed them with a sledgehammer for the Lord, and the fat man got up and he was perfectly fine. That was in the gym.

The evangelist pointed out that the cross in the chapel was bare.

Real Christians worshipped the triumphant Christ no cross could hold, whose body was glorified, resurrected and incorruptible, but Catholics had a perversion that bade them concentrate on fleshly things and worship graven images. They whipped themselves with whips and slept in coffins and all they cared about was the sick, dying human carcass that the Lord had discarded like the trash it was.

The evangelist said everybody should bring something to the fifty-yard line to burn on Friday. Rosaries, crucifixes, pocket-sized idols of the Virgin Mary, whatever was Catholic that you could get your hands on. One time he had burned some junk like that and you could hear the demons screaming as they spewed out of the fire, but he couldn’t promise anything.

Henry Gill didn’t sleep much. He was fourteen—a thin, worried boy with a wet-looking bowl of black hair and countless eruptions on his sweet, horrible face. He had big blue circles around his eyes, skin the color of skim milk, and a big soft lump on the left side of his chest.

They had thought at first it might be cancer but the doctors tested him out and discovered that his hormones had gone crazy. Henry had too much estrogen. It made the doctor laugh for some reason and then he stopped laughing and got serious.

“You are at a confusing age. I can assure you, however, that you are not going to grow a breast like a young lady. But please come back and see me if you do. Or seriously, if it gets any larger or becomes discolored or tender to the touch. My feeling is, it will eventually take care of itself.”

But so far it hadn’t.

Henry got free tuition to the Christian school because of his hardships. He lived with his mother and her uncle, an angry photographer who wore a bathrobe all day. Changes in photography trends and a series of near-fatal aneurysms had ruined Uncle Lipton’s life and personality. He only came out of his room—it used to be the sewing room until he moved in—to drive his dying car to Hardee’s for a sack of sausage biscuits and a dozen packs of mustard. It was all he would eat. He wouldn’t drink anything.

It came out that before her tragedy Polly Finch had supposedly let some army boys take pictures of her showing her chest, also with her jeans unzipped and “touching herself.” Also wearing a blue thong.

Henry hated the elite liberal media so much. They just had to ruin everything. Why didn’t his pants realize the reports were unconfirmed? The devil kept popping pictures in his head of Polly Finch shivering and shirtless, smiling at him, with twin pink bull’s-eyes on her chest and the chilly golden flesh of a nectarine.

He got out his book, the book his grandmother had given him, Your Body Is Changing: A Christian Teen’s Guide to Sexuality. It was the greatest book ever. It smelled like cedar because he kept it at the bottom of his sock drawer. He wanted to understand his feelings.

Later that night Henry fell asleep in front of the TV. He was awakened when Jesus sat on the arm of the couch. Henry was surprised to learn that Jesus looked a lot like Luke, the scruffy diner-owner on Gilmore Girls, a show Henry watched on cable every day after school.

“Hello, Henry, there’s someone I’d like you to meet,” said Jesus.

Henry looked in the doorway and saw a girl floating there, wearing a thin robe, bathed in orange light.

“Is that Polly Finch?” said Henry.

“Yes,” said Jesus. “You sure are smart.” He rubbed Henry’s head.

“Look, I’ve come out of my body,” said Polly Finch. “I need you to put me back in.”

“Okay,” said Henry.

“Thanks, Henry,” said Jesus. “I knew I could count on you.”

“I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do,” said Henry.

Jesus started to mumble, and Henry was afraid to ask Him to speak up.

All this occurred the day before the owl got in and gave Uncle Lipton his famous aneurysm.

Uncle Lipton became a kind of celebrity within hours of being rolled into the emergency room. The X-rays showed a gigantic aneurysm, the biggest one yet for Uncle Lipton, maybe the biggest one ever for anybody. Maybe it wasn’t even an aneurysm. Maybe it was a new discovery. Doctors the world over wanted to study him. There was this one doctor in London, England, who said, Come on over, the ticket’s on me! There wasn’t a moment to lose.

Everybody said this was the man to see. If he couldn’t fix Uncle Lipton nobody could.

One doctor told Henry not to eat solids for awhile and gave him some gel for his tongue, which had been injured during the problem with the owl. The gel turned Henry’s whole head numb and cozy. All of a sudden he was on a helicopter pad on top of the hospital and his mother was telling him goodbye.

“Are you sure you’re going to be okay while I’m gone to London, England?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Call Ruth Ann, okay? She’ll take care of you. Tell her I’m sorry this is so sudden.”

A scientist pointed at his watch.

Henry’s mother got into the helicopter with Uncle Lipton. The blades sliced the sky, faster and faster, and everyone had to go back inside the hospital. Henry’s mother told him something, but he couldn’t hear what.

Henry called animal control from a pay phone in the lobby and told them, “I got a sick owl in my house.”

After that, he took off walking. He walked through the glass doors and the vestibule and another set of glass doors and across the wide parking lot into the decorative trees and he just kept walking.

November in Alabama had been until that point as hot as a furnace but the Lord saw fit to put a tribulation in Henry’s path. The Lord found Henry in nothing but his good blue pants and a white T-shirt spotted with blood from his broken tongue and his hard black school shoes with no socks (Henry must have left the socks, along with his church shirt, in the scooped seat of the doctor’s plastic chair), and He blew a cold front through the state with whipping winds.

It was like Henry understood free will for the first time. You don’t have to call Ruth Ann. You don’t have to go home. It’s cold, but you can stay out in the cold. You can shoplift, theoretically. You can try to buy alcohol. You can undo your pants. You can pee on somebody’s flowerbed. You can do bad things because your mother isn’t around. Then, when you heed the Lord instead, that’s the only time it really counts.

Henry was in a wooded area, to which the hospital’s landscaping had subtly given way, when he remembered a video about devil worshippers they had watched in Social Studies. A repentant devil worshipper with long sideburns had explained that when you first try to sell your soul to the devil all nature goes against you. Rabbits and frogs and all kinds of animals come out of the woods and speak in human tongues and beg you not to do what you intend. Three times you have to turn them away, then they throw in the towel. Next thing you know, the devil comes out and gives you a bag with something awful in it.

What did Jesus want from Henry? Something about helping Polly Finch, or seeing her in person, in her coma pajamas, or praying over her so her legs started kicking, or marrying her, or appearing with her on the cover of a magazine at the drugstore where everybody could see it. And now, thanks to free will, everybody’s dream could come true.

The Lord guided Henry through the trees and onto a golf course, a kind of place where Henry had never been in real life. He crossed the sleepy hills, the still waters, the sandy places, until he witnessed something like a long fat serpent writhing on the ground. Henry squatted in a stand of shrubbery and peeked at the snaky thing, which turned out to be two people trying to fornicate in a sleeping bag.

“Uh, uh, uh,” they said.

From what little he could tell it was just the way Henry had imagined it.

There were some sounds of aggravation and then a brief silence.