Prayer and Sin

There can be no doubt that he was raised in a family filled with the requisite amount of love and tenderness, and he would try to convince himself—in later years, and truthfully in a few earlier ones as well—that the fact that he had steered wrong in one way or another has little to do with this particular memory. He was cared for and comforted and his parents actively hoped and prayed for all of the best things in the world for him. Possibly. When he was ill, which he seemed to be often, he was allowed to stay home from school and spend the day on the living room couch, watching late morning game shows while his mother would either poach an egg and put it on toast or drive to the grocery store to buy up a fresh dozen for an egg salad sandwich at lunchtime; eggs being a known cure for a variety of issues that ail young boys. When he had a fever that was high enough to warrant concern but not high enough for a trip to the doctor’s office, his mother would become his nurse who took his temperature and patted his leg anxiously, waiting for the fever to break. When his father arrived home, his father, seeing the boy recovered but in low spirits, would take him to the gaming store, to the neighborhood swimming pool, or to the park, where he would fall on his arm on the concrete court and, thinking it broken, the family would pack into the car and head to the emergency room, stopping to eat first at the 5 & Diner when, while sitting around the table, his arm’s swelling would magically—or, not magically exactly—be ameliorated and the ER skipped altogether.

His siblings, two older sisters, were as far from evil as he, though it would be long into their adult years before any of them looked at another with wonder. Siblinghood in younger years is often mere, something little more than natural fact: ten fingers, ten toes, two sisters, the peanut butter left out on the kitchen counter again. And jabs, when not a direct pinch or elbowing or poke with a baseball bat, were subtle, something resembling little chuckles on sitcom laugh tracks: a mean name, an unnecessary criticism, an innocently stated wish to be a part of a different family, a tribe more exciting, more loving, just...better. Hehehe.

Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, Wednesday evenings, Friday evenings, select Saturdays, and a full summer week at least once per year were anointed and so spent congregating within the small walls and low ceiling of a nondenominational church. When all tallied, a full third of their waking time was spent in the house of God, who was a patient yet inconsistent host, at times attentive, at others offering only a quick “hullo,” and at others seemingly spending the morning or evening at an entirely different business in an upstairs room while the music from below clattered at the floorboards and walls. When the boy inexpertly pointed out to his father that they spend more time in a week asleep than they do in church, the father noted that was a shame and brought it to the church ruling board, which soon agreed and added Thursday evening services in an attempt to make up for lost time. 

Yet, they gave even more than their time to God, of course. Their deeds, their emotions, their financial relations, their occupational relations, their relation relations, their health, home, and humor were all either given directly to God or withheld despite God (that deduction later repented in order to appear once more in the positive column on the eternal balance sheet).

And even more than all of these, they gave most willingly and most liberally their words. Words were their keys to unlocking the heart of God. Words were the active expressions of their appreciation, which came out as gifts of celebration; and of their desperations and desires, which took on the form of prayer. (Interestingly, the boy would note in perplexity more than once as he sat on a pew, that each prayer included a phrase something along the lines of “according to your [being God’s] will.” He didn’t understand how granting God permission to act according to God’s own desire would be enough to bend the omnipotent’s decision making. Does God by design not transcend time, know all, and already have any decision there could possibly be to be made, made? Prayer could seem -- only from time to time, thank God -- a sort of callow, philosophically dissonant activity. Take this for example: “Dear almighty, all loving, all knowing Lord: I have this here mild case of schizophrenia and would appreciate it if you would help to relieve me of it as I have been ever faithful or apologetic to you -- hoping it’s in accordance to your perfect will -- timeless, unchanging, irrefutable God -- which you are bound to regardless. Amen.” A stripped down version of this and every other case being: “Dear God, your will be done. Amen.”)

Despite this gap in logic, prayer works! Or at least seems to from time to time, as when a broken arm becomes healed while sitting in a blazing sunset diner. And so the boy learned at a young age to “take it to the lord in prayer,” a line from a grandmother’s favorite hymn and one of his favorite’s too. He’d spend hours in bed, thinking of others, fixing up problems, and planning his life in prayer.

One Friday evening, while lying in bed, his prayer went like this: 

“Beneficent God (he had recently learned the word beneficent and knew he’d put it to good use), first and foremost I’d like to pray that Parker Hitchens cut out the bullying, that he’d stop throwing empty candy wrappers at the back of my head on the bus and stop digging his thumb into the space underneath my ribs, where I have a permanent black spot now, and stop blowing his lunch burps on me in math class. Speaking of math, I’d also like to pray that I get a B plus or better on today’s test, because that would allow me not to take summer school with the kids who don’t care about their future. I’ve studied really hard and Mr. Schlidt refused to tutor me because I talk too much and have gotten kicked out of class too many times. Please help me not to get kicked out of class, because it’s not helping and mom and dad are losing their patience. Dear God, make me a man, or at least seem like one to Samantha Rockwood. I know we are meant to be together, but I don’t think she knows it yet.” (Samantha was eight years older than he. His family drove her home from church sometimes. She’d sit in the backseat of the van with him glancing into his eyes and singing Beatles or Motown songs that came on the radio, “One fine day-y-y, you’re gonna want me for your girl,” and she’d wrap her arm around his neck, teasing and toying with him, because everyone knew she was in truth desperate for Donny Jay.) “God knows what she’s praying for, God. Please don’t let it be for a date with Donny Jay. If I can go on just one date with her…that’s all. I want to pray for my sister, too, and I know she’s in her room right now probably praying again for this same exact thing -- so that’s two people in agreement -- but please heal her of her hernia, flatulence, and diarrhea, and introduce a good man into her life for her to marry. And I know this is a long shot, Lord God, but tomorrow morning is Luke Deucey’s birthday party (with water guns and a diving board) and Mom and Dad have told me I can’t go until I pick up all of the dog poop in the backyard and then mow the grass. They say I can do it quickly, but I know it will take a few hours at least, and I can’t start until the sun rises at 6:58 and the party starts at 9 a.m. So if by miracle the grass is already mowed in the morning and the poop already picked up, I will be eternally grateful and pray more and stop talking too much in class and stop getting boners in the middle of the night and not cuss in P.E., which I can do anyway, certainly, but I’d definitely start right away. All things according to your will, amen.”

On Sunday afternoon after church (Samantha had not been there that day and neither had Donny Jay, which made the boy think they must have been off together getting married), while sitting around the table at the 5 & Diner, their shirt’s untucked and the mother with her heels off under the table, the boy’s stomach began to ache with its common furiousness. They had just placed their order and there he sat, hunched over, hand held to his midsection, and foot tapping in agitation on the checker-tiled floor while that awful song “Everybody loves somebody sometime…” came on the jukebox. He put his head down on the table, too near the salad that had recently arrived, which caused the transfer of a few drops of ranch dressing to his hair, and he moaned. Son, are you alright? his father asked. The boy responded that his stomach ached. He felt like he would be sick, but he would do his best to eat. The father prayed over the meal and rested a red hot hand on the boy’s back when he added that the Lord may do well to cure the cause of the stomach ache and rebuked the forces of hell for bringing it upon the boy -- even though, paradoxically, the discomforting attack was seen as a positive sign that the family was walking well with the Lord and was therefore worthy of the devil’s attacks at all. As dinner ended, they noticed that the boy had only mustered a few french fries and less than half of his hamburger. Aren’t you feeling any better? they asked. A little bit, answered the boy. I couldn’t eat very much. That’s alright, said the father. We’ll take your food in a doggie bag. To which the mother offered, The french fries won’t reheat well. We’ll do our best, said the father with his red hot hand on the boy’s shoulder as they exited the diner and walked through the parking lot. We’ll do our best.

Later in the day they played cards in the living room. The boy, pretending to feel well, played along. Though he wasn’t paying much attention, focusing on his revolting stomach in an attempt to keep everything inside in place, he would laugh when others laughed and even at times when they didn’t to show he did indeed feel well. Yet he lost every hand and rubbed his hands against his scalp so that soon his hair was practically standing straight up, giving him a freshly electrocuted look. He stood up with a delirious smile, hair reaching for the sky, aided perhaps by the oil in the ranch dressing, and he excused himself to the bathroom where he kneeled in front of the toilet and looked up to heaven as if his life had crumbled and he were looking for an explanation. He made every effort to be silent as he vomited into the toilet so as not to alert his family of his illness. Emptied out and woozy, he stood and rinsed his mouth, flattened his hair and even tucked in his shirt, which he thought would be a sly signal to others that his bathroom activity was more in keeping with the norm than had been the case. When he sat back down to cards his mother asked, How you feelin’ bud? To which he answered, Everything is great. Another hand?

On Monday, math class came directly after lunch and the first thing Mr. Schlidt did was to hand out the results of last week’s test. He walked around the room setting the papers down on each student’s desks one by one. The teacher went round and round and round, and growing anxious, the boy bowed his head and closed his eyes to make one last appeal to God. Parker Hitchens, that malevolent turd, sat one desk over from the boy, and he leaned toward the boy and whispered, It’s too late for that, you know. How idiotic. You already took the test. After which he let out a flagrant silent but deadly burp and blew it in the boy’s direction. As lunch that day had been hot dogs, the stench, though relatively true to its initial processed and boiled scent, had enough of Parker Hitchens’ insides in it to be overwhelmingly nauseating. 

The boy’s paper was the last to be delivered by Mr. Schlidt, who dropped it from on high so that it fell to his desk and on a bed of air and began to slide quickly away in an effort to hurl itself to the ground where it might land face down forever or mercifully self destruct. But the boy caught a corner with his thumb and looking over the edge of his desk to read the red ink, witnessed a thick “C-” scrawled at the top. It felt to him to be an executioner’s seal. Summer school was now a fact of his future. Mr. Schlidt stood near the boy and bent his head low, waiting for the boy to look up. When he finally did, the teacher said, Meet me at my desk Mr. M. The rest of you, begin with the story problems in Chapter 12. 

The boy did not solicit Parker Hitchens for information on his score, but the bully offered it anyway: An A minus?! Darn. There goes my ice cream cone. And as the boy stood to walk to the front of the room, Hitchens stuck out his right foot, catching the boy’s step and nearly tripping him to the ground. Oops! Look out. That was my fault. That was definitely my fault. Forgive me. Will you? Will you?

Mr. Schlidt’s desk was mostly plain except for two features of which he was thoroughly proud. The first was an eight by ten inch underwater photograph of a man in a wetsuit and scuba gear, backed by brilliant blue and bordered on each side by the alien structures of white, orange, and purple coral columns. A tiny whale shark, freshly hatched from the look of it, swam in the area between the camera and the diver’s face, so that the face was blocked and the viewer couldn’t say with confidence who the man was. The boy chose not to believe it was Mr. Schlidt but rather someone the teacher aspired to be and likely never would. The second item was a perpetual motion machine built of concentric circling orbits arranged at varying angles around a metal ball sun, a polished machine that had not once been put into movement as far as any of the students knew.

The boy stood at the desk across from a seated Schlidt, who leaned across the paneled wood as he spoke to the boy. He spoke in a low breathy tone, and it was clear the teacher had eaten the same lunch as the students, including Hitchens, and may have enjoyed the same amount of red onions on his dog as the bully had. You are the newest enrollee in summer school, Mr. M. Both fortunately and unfortunately, I am teaching this year’s class, and I want to be clear on a few points. In this class, you will not speak without permission, to me or to anyone else. You will not move without permission. You will stay in your desk as if I had chained you to it myself and gagged you with a sock. And you will pass this class, or else I will have to teach you again next semester, which I do not and will not have the energy to do. Do you understand this, Mr. M.?

Mr. S, I do.

Sit down. Chapter 12. Not that it matters.

In this instance, the boy did not think of the martyrs, as his father had challenged him to do. He didn’t care if anyone had been fed to the Roman lions. He didn’t care if Saint Peter had hanged from an upside down cross or even if Jesus had hung from an upright one. He was living with the sting of failure, a mind as scrambled as his stomach, and there was nothing he cared to take up in prayer. Parker Hitchens blew burp after burp into his face, turning his stomach end over end. He would be jailed in summer school and grow sick with thoughts of Samantha Rockwood lying in the park with Donny Jay, singing rock and roll love songs to the wrong man. For whatever reason, the loving God would not heal him, had never actually helped him, and had, without a doubt and somewhat ironically, absolutely no appreciation for true love or its romantic endeavors. 

The boy, like old robbed Job, had lost it all. But instead of longing after God and instinctively singing the Lord’s praises despite the damage, something else altogether welled up in his young soul, something puzzling that filled his insides and mixed with the plaguing odor emanating from one desk over. It intoxicated and separated him from his body and seat, and he felt himself losing control. The entirety of his being spun on a vicious axis, the angle of which he could not contain. Mind, heart, and stomach, all in a line, spiraled and turned upside down, and he felt the contents of his life would all pour out of him and gurgle out of his head onto the classroom floor. 

He had witnessed spiritual possessions, of course, and had seen exorcisms take place in front of him, as well as on TV. One of his grandfather’s favorite television preachers popped a bad spirit out of place at least once a week, its poor human host always left wide eyed and dazed, empty and exhausted as if they’d just woken up from a frenzied coma. And he’d seen that famous movie scene, where the little girl with the devil inside vomits pea green, her head spinning around 360 degrees. His stomach. Parker Hitchens’s familiar foulness found him again. His lost love filled him again. The desk snapped like a bear trap and clamped to his midsection with razor sharp teeth, binding him to it forever. Like a wild animal ensnared, desperation and terror set in, and the boy finally broke. What he spoke began as a mumble but grew into a frantic speech. He made his plea to Hitchens, Mr. Schlidt, his parents, Samantha, God. To anyone who could and would actually help, which is to say to anyone and no one at all. Please stop. Please make it stop. Please make it stop. 

At this confusing speech, Hitchens glanced over aghast and offered only a chortling, Good god, man. Mr. Schlidt looked up from his desk and spotted the boy, hands to his scalp, face down and irreverently yelling at the poor numbers on the innocent page (which clearly had never done anything to hurt anyone, though sure they can be frustrating every now and again), Please stop, please stop. Incensed beyond measure, Schlidt stood up from behind his desk, pointed to the door and yelled with a booming authority never before witnessed in a mathematics classroom, Mr. M.! GET OUT!

The boy obliged in a beeline and bolt, threw open the heavy door, and found himself once again leaning against the bricks outside that classroom. All was quiet in the hall. As he stood, contemplating the delivery of Mr. Schlidt’s note to his parents, which they would need to sign and he would need to return by the next day, he saw something curious on the wall across the way. The mysterious item gleamed at him in gold and shining red, beckoning him to investigate. With a glance around the large hall, the boy stepped toward the opposite wall and paused when he realized the nature of that glowing device. Hovering in space between the anchoring wall of the math classroom and the device on the opposite wall, which happened to be very near the exit, the boy considered his family. He imagined dinner that evening, the praise and worship music coming from the stereo, the sporadic and unassociated “Praise the Lord”s, the pre-supper prayer requests. They would talk about their individual days, tsk tsk at the miniature depressions, laugh at the many ludicrous things.

His long pause in space continued. Had he been a satellite, he felt he would have already circled the planet twice.

In the evening, he would at some point need to present this newest and likely most damning note to his parents for their signature. The thought of which stirred his spinning and uneasiness all over again. 

He took half a step toward the opposite wall and paused again, meditating closely on the words printed in a strong, bold white on the cherry red device: PULL IN CASE OF FIRE.

Amen.