Revival

XIV

Those things happened three years ago. Now I live in Kailua, not far from my brother Conrad. It’s a pretty coastal town on the Big Island. My place is on Oneawa Street, a neighborhood quite distant from the beach and an even longer stretch from fashionable, but the apartment is spacious and—for Hawaii, at least—cheap. Also, it’s close to Kuulei Road, and that’s an important consideration. The Brandon L. Martin Psychiatric Center is on Kuulei Road, and that’s where my psychiatrist hangs out his shingle.

Edward Braithwaite says he’s forty-one, but to me he looks like he’s thirty. I’ve found that when you’re sixty-one—an age I will reach this August—every man and woman between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five appears to be thirty. It’s hard to take people seriously when they look as if they’re barely past their Terrible Twenties (it is for me, anyway), but I try hard with Braithwaite, because he’s done me quite a lot of good… although I’d have to say that the antidepressants have done more. I know that some people don’t like them. They claim the pills muffle both their thinking and their emotions, and I can testify that they do.

Thank God they do.

I connected with Ed thanks to Con, who gave up the guitar for athletics and gave up athletics for astronomy… although he’s still a volleyball monster, and not bad on the tennis court, either.

I’ve told Dr. Braithwaite everything you’ve read in these pages. I held back nothing. He doesn’t believe much of it, of course—who in his right mind would?—but what a relief in the telling! And certain elements of the story have given him pause, because they are verifiable. Pastor Danny, for instance. Even now, a Google search for that name will yield almost a million results; check it yourself if you don’t believe me. Whether or not any of his cures were genuine remains a matter of debate, but that is true even of Pope John Paul, who supposedly cured a French nun of Parkinson’s while alive, and a Costa Rican woman of an aneurysm six years after he died. (A good trick!) What happened to many of Charlie’s cures—what they did to themselves and what they did to others—is also a matter of fact rather than of conjecture. Ed Braithwaite believes I wove those facts into my narrative to give them verisimilitude. He almost said as much one day late last year, when he quoted Jung to me: “The world’s most brilliant confabulators are in asylums.”

I am not in an asylum; when I finish my sessions at Martin Psychiatric, I’m free to leave and go back to my silent, sunny apartment. For this I am grateful. I’m also grateful to still be alive, because many of Pastor Danny’s cures are not. Between the summer of 2014 and the fall of 2015, they committed suicide by the dozens. Perhaps by the hundreds—it’s hard to be sure. I’m helpless not to imagine them reawakening in that other world, marching naked beneath the howling stars, harried along by terrible ant-soldiers, and I am very glad I am not among them. I think that gratitude for life, whatever the cause, indicates that one has managed to hold on to the core of one’s sanity. That some of my sanity is gone forever—amputated, like an arm or a leg, by what I saw in Mary Fay’s deathroom—is a fact I have learned to live with.

And for fifty minutes every Tuesday and Thursday, between two o’clock and two fifty, I talk.

How I do talk.

On the morning after the storm, I woke up on one of the couches in the lobby of the Goat Mountain Resort. My face hurt and my bladder was bursting, but I had no desire to relieve myself in the men’s room across from the restaurant. There were mirrors in there, and I didn’t want to glimpse my reflection even by accident.

I went outside to piss and saw one of the resort’s golf carts crashed into the porch steps. There was blood on the seat and the rudimentary dashboard. I looked down at my shirt and saw more blood. When I wiped my swollen nose, a maroon crust flaked off on my finger. So I had driven the golf cart, and crashed it, and bumped my face, although I could remember doing none of that.

To say I didn’t want to go back to the cottage near Skytop would be the understatement of the century, but I had to. Getting into the golf cart was the easy part. Driving it back down the path through the woods was more difficult, and every time I had to stop and move fallen branches, it was harder to get going again. My nose was throbbing and my head was thumping with a tension headache.

The door was still standing open. I parked, got out of the cart, and at first could only stand there, rubbing at my poor swollen nose until it began to ooze blood again. The day was sunny and beautiful—the storm had washed away all the heat and humidity—but the room beyond that open door was a cave of shadows.

There’s nothing to worry about, I told myself. Nothing will happen. It’s over.

Only what if it wasn’t? What if the something was still happening?

What if she was waiting for me, and ready to reach with that claw made of faces?

I forced myself up the steps, one at a time, and when a crow cawed harshly from the woods behind me, I cringed and screamed and covered my head. The only thing that kept me from bolting was the knowledge that if I didn’t see what was in there, Mary Fay’s deathroom would haunt me for the rest of my life.

There was no pulsing abomination with a single black eye. Charlie’s Patient Omega lay as she had when I last saw her, with two bullet holes in her nightgown and two more in the sheet around her hips. Her mouth was open, and although there was no sign of that horrible black extrusion, I didn’t even try to tell myself I had imagined it all. I knew better.

The metal band, now dull and dark, still circled her forehead.

Jacobs’s position had changed. Instead of lying on his side next to the bed with his knees drawn up, he was propped in a sitting position on the other side of the room, against the bureau. My first thought was that he hadn’t been dead after all. The terror of what had happened in here had brought on another stroke, but not an immediately fatal one. He had come to, crawled as far as the bureau, and died there.

It could have been, except for the revolver in his hand.

I stared at it for a long time, frowning, trying to recall. I couldn’t then, and I have refused Ed Braithwaite’s offer to hypnotize me in an effort to recover my blocked memories. Partly this is because I’m afraid of what hypnosis might release from the darker regions of my mind. Mostly it’s because I know what must have happened.

I turned from Charlie’s body (that expression of horror was still stamped on his face) to look at Mary Fay. I had fired the revolver five times, I was sure of that, but only four bullets had gone into her. One had gone wild, not surprising when you consider my state of mind. But when I lifted my eyes to the wall, I saw two bullet holes there.

Had I gone back to the resort, then returned the previous evening? I supposed it was possible, but I didn’t think I could have brought myself to do that, even in a blackout. No, I had fixed this scene before I left. Then I went back, crashed the golf cart, staggered up the steps, and fell asleep in the lobby.

Charlie hadn’t dragged himself across the room; I was the one who did the dragging. I propped him against the bureau, put the gun in his right hand, and fired it into the wall. The cops who would eventually discover this bizarre scene might not test Charlie’s hand for gunshot residue, but if they did, they would find it.

I wanted to cover Mary Fay’s face, but everything had to be left exactly as it was, and what I wanted most of all was to escape that room of shadows. I took a moment longer, though. I knelt beside my old fifth business and touched one of his thin wrists.

“You should have stopped, Charlie,” I said. “You should have stopped a long time ago.”

But could he have done that? It would be easy to say yes, because that would allow me to lay blame. Only I’d have to blame myself as well, because I hadn’t stopped, either. Curiosity is a terrible thing, but it’s human.

So human.

“I hadn’t been there at all,” I told Dr. Braithwaite. “That’s what I decided, and there was only one person who could testify that I had been.”

“The nurse,” Ed said. “Jenny Knowlton.”

“I thought she’d have no choice but to help me. We had to help each other, and the way to do it would be to say we’d left Goat Mountain together, when Jacobs started raving about turning off Mary Fay’s life support. I was sure Jenny would go along with that, if only to make certain I kept quiet about her part in it. I didn’t have her cell number, but I knew Jacobs would. His address book was in the Cooper Suite, and sure enough, her number was in it. I called and got voicemail. I told her to call me back. Astrid’s number was also in his book, so I tried her next.”

“And also got voicemail.”

“Yes.” I put my hands over my face. Astrid’s days of answering her phone had been all over by then. “Yes, that’s right.”

Here’s what happened. Jenny drove her golf cart back to the resort; Jenny got into her Subaru; Jenny drove to Mount Desert Island without stopping. All she wanted was the comfort of home. That meant Astrid, and sure enough, Astrid was waiting for her. Their bodies were found just inside the front door. Astrid must have plunged the butcher knife into her partner’s throat as soon as Jenny walked in. Then she used it to cut her wrists. She did it crosswise, not the recommended technique… but she cut all the way to the bone. I imagine them lying there in pools of drying blood while first Jenny’s phone rang in her purse, then Astrid’s on the kitchen counter below the knife rack. I don’t want to imagine that, but I am helpless to stop it.

Not all of Jacobs’s cures killed themselves, but over the next two years, a great many did. Not all of them took loved ones with them, but over fifty did; this I know from my research, which I shared with Ed Braithwaite. He would like to write it off as coincidence. He can’t quite do it, although he is happy to dispute my own conclusion from this parade of madness, suicide, and murder: Mother demands sacrifices.

Patricia Farmingdale, the lady who poured salt in her eyes, recovered enough of her vision to smother her elderly father in his bed before blowing her brains out with her husband’s Ruger. Emil Klein, the dirt-eater, shot his wife and son, then went out to his garage, poured lawnmower gas over himself, and struck a match. Alice Adams—cured of cancer at a Cleveland revival—went into a convenience store with her boyfriend’s AR-15 and unloaded, killing three random people. When the clip was empty, she pulled a snub-nose .38 from her pocket and fired it into the roof of her mouth. Margaret Tremayne, one of Pastor Danny’s San Diego cures (Crohn’s disease), threw her infant son from the balcony of her ninth-story apartment, then followed him down. Witnesses said she uttered not a sound as she fell.

Then there was Al Stamper. You probably know about him; how could you have missed the screaming headlines on the supermarket tabloids? He invited both of his ex-wives to dinner, but one of them—the second, I believe—got caught in traffic and showed up late, which was lucky for her. When she walked in the open door of Stamper’s Westchester home, she discovered Wife Number One roped to a chair at the dining room table with the top of her head caved in. The ex–lead singer of the Vo-Lites emerged from the kitchen, brandishing a baseball bat slimed with blood and hair. Wife Number Two fled the house, screaming, with Stamper chasing after her. Halfway down the residential street, he fell to the pavement, dead of a heart attack. No surprise there; he was a heavyweight.

I’m sure I didn’t find all the cases, scattered across the country as they were, and buried in the outbreaks of senseless violence that seem more and more to be a part of daily life in America. Bree could have found others, but she wouldn’t have helped me even if she had still been single and living in Colorado. Bree Donlin-Hughes wants nothing to do with me these days, and I totally get that.

Shortly before Christmas last year, Hugh phoned Bree’s mother and asked her to come up to his office at the big house. He said he had a surprise for her, and he certainly did. He strangled his old lover with a lamp cord, carried her body into the garage, and slipped her into the passenger seat of his vintage Lincoln Continental. Then he got behind the wheel, started the engine, got some rock on the radio, and sucked exhaust.

Bree knows I promised to steer clear of Jacobs… and Bree knows I lied.

“Let us suppose it’s all true,” Ed Braithwaite said during one of our recent sessions.

“How daring of you,” I said.

He smiled, but stayed on point. “It still wouldn’t follow that the vision you saw of that hellish afterlife was a true vision. I know it still haunts you, Jamie, but consider all the people—not excluding John of Patmos, author of the Book of Revelation—who’ve had visions of heaven and hell. Old men… old women… even children claim to have peeked beyond the veil. Heaven Is for Real is basically the afterlife vision of a kid who almost died when he was four—”

“Colton Burpo,” I said. “I read it. He talks about a horsie only Jesus can ride.”

“Make fun all you want,” Braithwaite said, shrugging. “Lord knows it’s an easy account to make fun of… but Burpo also met a miscarried sister whom he knew nothing about. That’s verifiable information. Like all those murder-suicides.”

“Many murder-suicides, but Colton only met one sister,” I said. “The difference is one of quantity. I never took a course in statistics, but I know that.”

“I’m happy to assume the kid’s vision of the afterlife was false, because it supports my thesis that your vision of it—the sterile city, the ant-things, the black-paper sky—was equally false. You see what I’m driving at, don’t you?”

“Yes. And I’d love to buy into it.”

Of course I would. Anyone would. Because every man and woman owes a death, and the thought of going to the place I saw has done more than cast a shadow over my life; it has made that life seem thin and unimportant. No—not just my life, every life. So I hang on to one thought. It’s my mantra, the first thing I tell myself in the morning and the last thing I tell myself at night.

Mother lied.

Mother lied.

Mother lied.

Sometimes I almost believe it… but there are reasons I can’t quite manage to do so.

There are signs.

Before going back to Nederland—where I would discover that Hugh had killed himself after murdering Bree’s mother—I drove to the home place in Harlow. There were two reasons for this. After Jacobs’s body was discovered, the police might get in touch with me and ask for an accounting of my time in Maine. That seemed important (although in the end, they never did), but something else was more important: I needed the comfort of a familiar place, and people who loved me.

I didn’t get it.

You remember Cara Lynne, don’t you? My great-niece? The one I carried around at the Labor Day party in 2013 until she fell asleep on my shoulder? The one who held out her arms to me every time I came near? When I walked into the house where I’d grown up, Cara Lynne was between her mother and dad, sitting in an old-fashioned high chair that I might have sat in once myself. When the little girl saw me, she began to scream and throw herself from side to side so violently that she would have tumbled to the floor if her dad hadn’t caught her. She buried her face against his chest, still screeching at the top of her lungs. She only stopped when her grandfather Terry led me out onto the porch.

“What the hell’s that about?” he asked, half-humorously. “Last time you were here, she couldn’t get enough of you.”

“Don’t know,” I said, but of course I did. I had hoped to stay a night, perhaps two, sucking up normality the way a vampire sucks blood, but that wasn’t going to work. I didn’t know exactly what Cara Lynne sensed in me, but I never wanted to see her small, terrified face again.

I told Terry I’d just stopped by to say hello, couldn’t even stay for supper, had a plane to catch in Portland. I’d been in Lewiston, I said, slop-recording a band Norm Irving had told me about. He said he thought they had national potential.

“And do they?” he asked.

“Nah. Strictly lo-fi.” I made a business of looking at my watch.

“Never mind the plane,” Terry said. “You can catch another one. Come on in and have dinner with the family, little brother. Cara will settle down.”

I didn’t think so.

I told Terry I had recording gigs at Wolfjaw that I absolutely could not miss. I told him another time. And when he held out his arms to me, I hugged him hard, knowing chances were good I’d never see him again. I didn’t know about the murders and suicides then, but I knew I was carrying something poisonous, and would probably carry it for the rest of my life. The last thing I wanted was to infect the people I loved.

On the way back to my rental car, I stopped and looked at the dirt strip between the lawn and Methodist Road. The road had been paved for years, but the strip of dirt looked just as it had when I used to play there with the toy soldiers my sister gave me for my sixth birthday. I had been kneeling there and playing with them one day in the fall of 1962, when a shadow fell over me.

That shadow is still there.

“Have you murdered anyone?”

Ed Braithwaite has asked me this question on several occasions. It is, I believe, what’s called incremental repetition. I always smile and tell him no. It’s true that I put four bullets into poor Mary Fay, but the woman was already dead at the time, and Charles Jacobs died of a final cataclysmic stroke. If it hadn’t happened that day, it would have happened on another, and probably before the year was out.

“And you obviously haven’t committed suicide,” Ed continues, smiling himself. “Unless I’m hallucinating you, that is.”

“You’re not.”

“The impulse isn’t there?”

“No.”

“Not even as a theoretical possibility? One that comes to you in the dead of night, perhaps, when you can’t sleep?”

“No.”

My life these days is far from happy, but the antidepressants have put a floor under me. Suicide isn’t on my radar. And given what may come after death, I want to live as long as possible. There’s something else, too. I feel—rightly or wrongly—that I have a lot to atone for. Because of that, I’m still trying to be a do-right daddy. I cook at the Harbor House soup kitchen on Aupupu Street. I volunteer two days a week at the Goodwill on Keolu Drive, next to the Nene Goose Bakery. If you’re dead, you can’t atone for anything.

“Tell me, Jamie—why are you the special lemming who feels no urge to jump off the cliff? Why are you immune?”

I just smile and shrug. I could tell him, but he wouldn’t believe me. Mary Fay was Mother’s door into our world, but I was the key. Shooting a corpse kills nothing—not that an immortal being such as Mother can be killed—but when I fired that pistol, I locked the door. I said no with more than my mouth. If I told my shrink that some otherworldly being, one of the Great Ones, was saving me for some final and apocalyptic act of revenge because of that no, said shrink might begin thinking about involuntary committal. I don’t want that, because I have another duty, one I consider far more important than helping out at Harbor House or sorting clothes at the Goodwill.

At the end of each session with Ed, I pay his receptionist by check. I can afford to do this because the itinerant rock guitarist turned recording engineer is now a wealthy man. Ironic, isn’t it? Hugh Yates died without issue, and left a substantial fortune (handed down from his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather) behind. There were many small bequests, including gifts of cash to Malcolm “Mookie” McDonald and Hillary Katz (aka Pagan Starshine), but a large part of the estate was to be divided between me and Georgia Donlin.

Given Georgia’s death at Hugh’s hands, that particular bequest could have provided probate attorneys with twenty years’ worth of legal munching and tasty fees, but since there was no one to kick up dickens (I certainly wasn’t going to), there was no wrangle. Hugh’s lawyers got in touch with Bree and told her that, as the deceased was her mother, she arguably had a valid claim on the loot.

Only Bree wouldn’t argue. The lawyer who handled my end of the business told me Bree claimed Hugh’s money was “tainted.” Perhaps so, but I had no compunctions about taking my share of it. Partly because I played no part in Hugh’s cure, mostly because I consider myself tainted already, and feel it’s better to be tainted in comfort than in poverty. I have no idea what happened to the several million that would have gone to Georgia, and have no desire to find out. Too much knowledge isn’t good for a person. I know that now.

When my twice-weekly session is finished and my bill is paid, I leave Ed Braithwaite’s outer office. Beyond is a wide carpeted hall lined with other offices. A right turn would take me back to the lobby, and from the lobby to Kuulei Road. But I don’t turn right. I turn left. Finding Ed was just happenstance, you see; I originally came to the Brandon L. Martin Psychiatric Center on other business.

I walk down the hallway, then cross the fragrant, beautifully maintained garden that is the green heart of this large facility. Here patients sit taking the reliable Hawaiian sun. Many are fully dressed, some are in pajamas or nightgowns, a few (recent arrivals, I believe) wear hospital johnnies. Some engage in conversations, either with fellow patients or with unseen companions. Others merely sit, looking at the trees and flowers with vacant, drugged-to-the-gills stares. Two or three are accompanied by attendants, lest they hurt themselves or others. The attendants usually greet me by name as I pass. They know me well by now.

On the other side of this open-air atrium is Cosgrove Hall, one of three Martin Center in-patient residences. The other two are for short-termers, mainly people with substance-abuse problems. The usual stay in those is twenty-eight days. Cosgrove is for people with issues that take longer to resolve. If they ever do.

Like the corridor in the main building, the one in Cosgrove is wide and carpeted. Like the corridor in the main building, the air is chilled to perfection. But there are no pictures on the walls, and no Muzak, either, because in it some of the patients hear voices murmuring obscenities or issuing sinister directives. In the main building’s corridor, some of the doors are open. Here, all are shut. My brother Conrad has been residing in Cosgrove Hall for almost two years now. The Martin Center administrators and the psychiatrist in charge of his case want to move him to a more permanent facility—Aloha Village on Maui has been mentioned—but so far I have resisted. Here in Kailua I can visit him after my appointments with Ed, and thanks to Hugh’s generosity, I can afford his upkeep.

Although I must admit my walks down the Cosgrove hallway are a trial.

I try to make them with my eyes fixed on my feet. I can do that, because I know it’s exactly one hundred and forty-two steps from the atrium doorway to Con’s small suite. I don’t always succeed—sometimes I hear a voice whispering my name—but mostly I do.

You remember Con’s partner, don’t you? The hunk from the University of Hawaii Botany Department? I didn’t name him then and don’t intend to now, although I might have done if he ever visited Connie. He doesn’t, though. If you asked him, I’m sure he’d say Why in God’s name would I want to visit the man who tried to kill me?

I can think of two reasons.

One, Con wasn’t in his right mind… or in any mind at all, for that matter. After hitting the hunk over the head with a lamp, my brother ran into the bathroom, locked the door, and swallowed a handful of Valium tablets—a small handful. When Botany Boy came around (with a bloody scalp that needed stitches, but otherwise not much the worse for wear), he called 911. The police came and broke down the bathroom door. Con was passed out and snoring in the tub. The EMTs examined him and didn’t even bother to pump his stomach.

Con didn’t try very hard to kill either Botany Boy or himself—that’s the other reason. But of course, he was one of Jacobs’s first cures. Probably the first. On the day he left Harlow, Charlie told me that Con had almost certainly cured himself; the rest had been a trick, pure huggermugger. It’s a skill they try to teach in divinity school, he’d said. I was always good at it.

Only he lied. The cure was as real as Con’s current state of semi-catatonia. I know that now. I was the one Charlie conned, not just once but again and again and again. Still—count your blessings, right? Conrad Morton had a lot of good stargazing years before I woke Mother. And there’s hope for him. He plays tennis, after all (although he never speaks), and as I said, he’s a volleyball monster. His doctor says he’s begun to show increased outward response (whatever that is when it’s at home), and the nurses and orderlies are less likely to come in and see him standing in the corner and striking his head lightly against the wall. Ed Braithwaite says that in time Conrad may come all the way back; that he may revive. I choose to believe he will. People say that where there’s life, there’s hope, and I have no quarrel with that, but I also believe the reverse.

There is hope, therefore I live.

Twice a week, after my talks with Ed, I sit in the living room of my brother’s suite and talk some more. Some of what I tell him is real—a kerfuffle at Harbor House that brought the police, a particularly large haul of almost-new clothes at the Goodwill, how I’ve finally gotten around to watching all five seasons of The Wire—and some of it is made up, like the woman I’m supposedly seeing who works as a waitress at the Nene Goose Bakery, and the long Skype conversations I have with Terry. Our visits are monologues rather than conversations, and that makes fiction necessary. My real life just won’t do, because these days it’s as sparsely furnished as a cheap hotel room.

I always finish by telling him he’s too thin, he has to eat more, and by telling him that I love him.

“Do you love me, Con?” I ask.

So far he hasn’t answered, but sometimes he smiles a little. That’s an answer of a kind, wouldn’t you agree?

When four o’clock comes and our visit is over, I reverse course and walk back down to the atrium, where the shadows—of the palms, the avocados, and the big, twisted banyan at the center of it all—have begun to grow long.

I count my steps, and I take little glances at the door ahead of me, but otherwise keep my gaze firmly fixed on the carpet. Unless I hear that voice whispering my name.

Sometimes when that happens, I’m able to ignore it.

Sometimes I cannot.

Sometimes I look up in spite of myself and see that the hospital wall, painted soothing pastel yellow, has been replaced with gray stones held together by ancient mortar and covered with ivy. The ivy is dead, and the branches look like grasping skeletal hands. The small door in the wall is hidden, Astrid was right about that, but it’s there. The voice comes from behind it, drifting through an ancient rusty keyhole.

I walk on resolutely. Of course I do. Horrors beyond comprehension wait on the other side of that door. Not just the land of death, but the land beyond death, a place full of insane colors, mad geometry, and bottomless chasms where the Great Ones live their endless, alien lives and think their endless, malevolent thoughts.

It’s the Null beyond that door.

I walk on, and think of the couplet in Bree’s last email: That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons, even death may die.

Jamie, an old woman’s voice whispers from the keyhole of a door only I can see. Come. Come to me and live forever.

No, I tell her, just as I told her in my vision. No.

And… so far, so good. But eventually something will happen. Something always does. And when it does…

I will come to Mother.

April 6, 2013–December 27, 2013