by Christian TeBordo
According to my parents, I walked into their bedroom one evening at the age of three and informed them that my grandfather was dead.
“What gave you that idea?” my mother said, not now but when I was three.
I told her Tina told me.
My parents say now that they were concerned at the moment. This was in the early days of stranger danger and satanic panic but before my seizures and dizzy spells, the latter two of which have since been resolved, attributed, eventually, to allergies. As a child, I seem to have been allergic to the whole world.
My father informs me that the phone rang before they could follow up; it was his mother, calling to inform him that his own father was dead, hit by a mail truck while crossing a dark country road. For the next several days my parents were occupied with grief and funeral arrangements. I recall standing by the graveside, surrounded by sobbing aunts, uncles, and cousins, wondering why I was not crying myself.
What I do not recall was that visit from Tina, or telling my parents what Tina is supposed to have told me. This part of my life story exists entirely in my parents’ memory, but I had and have no reason to doubt them. They have always practiced a radical sort of honesty with me, which is how I later came to learn that neither of them had ever dabbled in alcohol or illicit drugs; that both had been virgins when they married and neither had been tempted by the flesh of any other, before or after; nor had either of them ever scored less than a B on a report card, considered dropping out of college, been fired from a job with cause or without, or been investigated for manslaughter though not charged.
When, they say, they finally thought to ask me about Tina, I had no more information to give them. Tina, they concluded, was my guardian angel. It was the only possible explanation for what had happened, the only way I could have known about my grandfather’s passing. Her presence in my room, in my life, they said, was a sign that God had a great plan for me, and that I should always be receptive to her voice.
“Angels are boys,” they say I said, and I don’t recall that either.***
Years later, a boy by the unfortunate name of Burpo entered a hospital with appendicitis and emerged with an account of the afterlife. His parents compiled his recounting into a book called Heaven Is for Real, which became a bestseller.
In Heaven, in his recounting, young Burpo sprouted wings and a halo, though the wings were smaller than he would have hoped, more ornamental than useful, and he was serenaded by angels, the Virgin Mary, and John the Baptist, who was, he said, “a really nice guy,” while cuddled in Jesus’s lap. Jesus, who in Burpo’s Heaven was a bushy-bearded white man with caterpillar-brows, pretty, sea-blue eyes, a white robe with a purple sash, and “a gold thing on his head” — physically distinct from the bluish Holy Spirit and God, next to whom Jesus had the honor of sitting — had arrived for the interview on a white horse with a rainbow mane. After the Heavenly Host performed their impromptu cosmic concert, Jesus led His celestial army to victory in the final battle between good and evil.
This was all historically, theologically, and doctrinally unsound, and many practitioners in those fields declared the book a hoax or a heresy, but more than ten million people bought and read it, many were inspired, and I, personally, found the horse, which I could not help picturing as a unicorn, compelling if not convincing. If it had been my own creation, or revelation, I would not have been able to resist using it for comic relief, forcing it to speak sardonically in slogans. Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate. Huis clos. Arbeit macht frei.
***
Around the same time, a boy whose name was unfortunate in the opposite direction—Malarkey—awoke permanently paralyzed from a two-month coma during which, he claimed, he had an out-of-body experience at the site of the car accident that caused the coma and injuries, then took multiple subsequent trips to heaven and back.
In a book written with his father, The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, Malarkey described a less spectacular afterlife than Burpo’s, in which Heaven has a back door leading to Hell, through which the devil comes and goes as he pleases. There is scriptural precedent for this portal: In Jesus’s parable of Lazarus and the rich man, the rich man, suffering eternal torment, looks up to find Lazarus, who had been a beggar in the beforelife, comfortable in the bosom of Abraham. But when the rich man begs Lazarus for a single drop of water as though that might slake his thirst, Abraham tells him that “no one can go from us to you, nor can anyone cross over from you to us.”
Elsewhere, though, this rule seems not to apply to the devil, who arrives “from roaming throughout the Earth, going back and forth on it” to stand with the angels before the throne of the Lord in order to accuse Job, like a satanic lawyer, of fearing the Lord only because he is particularly well blessed.
I don’t recall whether the devil accused Malarkey of anything during his several visits, because the boy’s descriptions of the man himself aroused my suspicions. He depicts a fleshless body covered in “moldy stuff,” a funny-looking mouth with a few rotten teeth, and no ears at all. Of course, the devil can assume any human shape, but he has only one, fat, wide nostril, through which you can see up to his brain, which is consumed by the fires of hell. How Malarkey could have met the devil without noticing that, or noticed it without remarking on it, made him, in my opinion, an entirely unreliable narrator.
And then there were the clothes — “torn and dirty” robes. Please. Satan is a suit-and-tie guy. Several of them, actually. Richard Dawson. John O’Hurley. Steve Harvey. These are people you never saw looking less-then-sharp. It probably distracted you from their nostrils. Nevertheless, Malarkey sold millions as well.
***
Meanwhile, I was well into adulthood and had failed to sell anything at all. I had failed to produce much, either. A handful of poems. A few scraps of prose. I told myself and my parents that I was too busy accumulating experience, experience that I would use as writing material, the writing the only way, I was certain, to fulfill God’s great plan for me, my great calling, the one He’d gestured toward by sending Tina to visit.
Over the years I had scored less than a B on a report card many times; more than dabbled in alcohol and illicit drugs; lost my virginity at the first opportunity, been tempted by the flesh of every woman and many men who came within viewing range, and faithful to none for more than a few consecutive days; had considered dropping out of college, only graduating by accident; been fired from many jobs with cause and without; and been investigated for manslaughter though not charged.
I had trouble, at the time, imagining consequences, believing that the consequences for any of my actions could be minimal at worst, as I had not yet begun to fulfill God’s great plan for my life, a plan I would be unable to fulfill if that life or the world came to an end. I knew that God’s plans never went unfulfilled, and yet no amount of experience could inspire me to begin fulfilling it.
***
In contrast to my waking life, my dreams have always been mundane. In my sleep, I drive or walk, but I am not going anywhere in particular, and much of the time I merely sit, alone. Nevertheless, there is a single dream that stands out from all others, because, though I was also sitting in that one, something nearly happened in it.
I dreamed my parents and I were seated outside a Parisian cafe. This was not a real, or specific, Parisian cafe; it was more like the one represented in a television commercial that was airing at the time, for Taster’s Choice instant coffee, if that makes it easier for you to picture. As I said, I was sitting; we were sitting around a table when suddenly a panel dropped out of the sky. The panel was not uniform like a ceiling tile; in fact it was jagged as though the heavens had been cracked or shoved from behind, a shape like the aureole surrounding Their Lady of Guadalupe, though less explicitly vaginal. And as in Guadalupe, a sort of revelation appeared, this one a celestial castle shining brighter than anything I’d ever seen, yet all of its edges and details were still entirely distinct.
“It’s the end of the world,” my mother said, the mother of my dream, but otherwise everything went on as before.
That’s all I remember of the only dream I really remember. I have never told this to anyone.
***
It had taken so little to get Burpo and Malarkey to tell their stories — a mere appendectomy and a near-fatal car crash respectively—and they were reaping their heavenly rewards right here on Earth. Their success was a low point in my own life. My mind began to play tricks on me. Every time a postal truck drove by me I misread the slogan on the side as “We’d die for you,” and every time, it brought me to tears.
Until Malarkey admitted that he’d manufactured the whole tale. At first he called it “an exaggeration and an embellishment,” but he eventually declared, “I said I went to Heaven because I thought it would get me attention.” It was enough to shake my faith, not in God, but in Heaven. As far as I know, Burpo still lives as though Heaven is real, but I always knew Heaven Is for Real was not for real in the first place. An appendectomy is not a near-death experience. He never nearly died.
***
My grandfather, on the other hand, died and stayed dead.
In his later years, he’d become a great fan of a then-new television game show called Family Feud, in which families competed against each other to guess the answers to survey questions. The surveys were administered to dozens of people otherwise unconnected to the show and tabulated and ranked before the competition itself. The families scored points based on how many survey responses matched their guesses. The answers and guesses were often humorous, ribald, embarrassing, the contestants forced to imagine the kind of things a survey participant would say granted complete anonymity, thereby admitting that they shared the same or similar thoughts, ideas, and feelings.
My grandfather didn’t care much about the feud aspect of the show, though he liked to watch the teenage daughters, the spinster aunts, the exhausted mothers, and feisty grandmothers flirt and vamp for the host as though that might provide an advantage, but what he liked most was playing along from the crouch. He was proud of his ability to predict what the surveys said.
I have no recollection of watching the show with my grandfather, and I’m not sure whether I ever did, but as I came into self-awareness, I have many memories of my parents sitting us down on our own couch to watch new and old episodes of the Family Feud in memoriam. On certain anniversaries — the dates of my grandfather’s birth and death, obviously, but also of the opening of the state turnpike, on which he had happily spent his whole career as a toll collector, and, oddly, national thank a mail carrier day — we would even eat his favorite meal, chipped beef and grape Kool-Aid, in front of the television, with ambrosia, not the food of the gods but a jello mold with marshmallows suspended inside, for dessert.
I hated those evenings from the beginning, as I hated and hate the Family Feud. I hate the idea that right and wrong do not matter, or worse, that most common can become right, and uncommon, wrong, that nuclear power is a primary driver of climate change, that Benjamin Franklin was one of the greatest presidents of the United States, and that “anal” is not only a sexual position, but the second best of them. I am fascinated and amused by and in love with every human being I meet, but the bland stew that is the concept humanity has always been repulsive to me.
The manslaughter that I was investigated for but not charged with involved a barroom dispute over the greatest game show of all time. That guy got off lucky, in my opinion. I would rather die than ever watch another episode of the Family Feud. I would be happy to die if that meant never watching another episode of the Family Feud. In any case, I was not charged because the prosecutors agreed I acted in self-defense, though I like to imagine they saw, as I did, how dangerous Family Feud’s existence is to civilization.
***
Unfortunately, the Family Feud exists outside of civilization, predates and is forecast to outlast it, and my grandfather is watching even now. The afterlife is a live studio audience. It’s true that no one can go from them to us, nor can anyone cross over from us to them, but Tina has a dispensation to roam throughout the Earth and go back and forth on it, and she swears that it’s true.
What is not true is that I only remember the one dream I already told you. There is another, much more recent. In the recent dream I am walking rather than sitting. Though I have no particular destination, I am in the bowels of the church I attended while growing up, before the ban. It starts in the gathering room where they hold the pancake breakfasts and the after-service potlucks. Even given all that’s happened — I remember my whole life in the dream — I have fond memories of this place, but something about it is off. The lights are on but dim, and the walls seem to vibrate with a low electric tone, a sort of spectral glide like the wah-wahs you mistake for the om on the tail-end of a nitrous binge. I leave the room, as much to get out of it as to find the source of the hum.
It grows stronger as I climb the stairs to the sanctuary, and from behind the closed doors of the narthex, I can tell that the sound is intentional, that it’s some kind of music. The doors creak slowly open, as in a haunted house, the haunted house of God, to reveal the source. At the front of the otherwise empty sanctuary, to the right of the altar, where the praise and worship band used to play, the praise and worship band is playing. They look, to a person, like Mötley Crüe, circa 1983. They don’t sound like the Crüe, though. Their music pulses and warbles lethargically like a cassette tape played backward. The song has one lyric only, sung toneless and without emotion. Lidocaine, they sing. Lidocaine. Lidocaine.
***
I wasn’t entirely lying to you when I said there was only the one dream. I remember this second dream, but I don’t believe the dream was mine. I’ve never gone in for obvious symbolism, but especially not when I disagree with the underlying sentiment. Religion is not the opiate of the masses, and God has never been a comfort to me. If He had ever offered me His anaesthetic, I would have accepted without question. The fact that he hasn’t is how I know that the world will never end and that I can never die, no matter how desperately I might wish to.
What I’m saying is that I think I was dreaming on your behalf, that somehow I dreamed your dream. Tina says that’s entirely plausible. She says it sounds just like you. She says I’m better than that.
She’s been here with me on and off all along, by the way. She tells me my grandfather is happy, but she won’t say whether he is in Heaven or Hell. In life he was a good man, though not particularly religious, but my understanding of salvation is that none of that ultimately matters.
______
Christian TeBordo has published seven books, most recently the novel The Apology and the collection Ghost Engine. A new volume, Discord, a Regression, which will include reissues of his first two novels along with a new one called The Mammoth Arms, is forthcoming from Long Day Press. He lives on a waterfall in Upstate New York and works in marketing.
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