© J.L. Powers, 2007
Do not publish without permission of the author
DYLAN
.
We get off the bus on Market and start walking up Hyde Street. We pass City Hall, a big gray building with bright gold trim on its dome, and kick at pigeons so they fly away rather than standing in our path. Somebody has stretched one of those blue tarps that you use for camping between two grocery carts and a fence “voila, instant one-room apartment” and you can hear two people whispering inside.
Aisha and I tiptoe past.
We pass The Century with its sign announcing “50 naughty hotties” and even though I’m with Aisha, I can’t help peeking at the porno photos hung up just inside the theatre, which you can see if the doors are open. A couple of doors down, two women are huddled together under a sleeping bag, their shopping bags lined up in the doorway to provide a sort of wall, some privacy. A woman is inspecting a sore on the other woman’s back.
“He’s always yelling stuff,” I warn Aisha before we get there. My friend Jaime and me, when we come here, we figure we have to do at least one of the things he tells us to do.
“Of course,” she says. “He’s Jesus, right?”
“Exactly.” She gets it, this girl. She really gets it. Makes me kinda dig her. In a friendly kind of way, of course. Grinning at her, all cheesy, I snap my pinky and thumb together and point at her, making a clicking sound with my tongue. She laughs. Okay, yeah, I’m a dork.
J.C. is standing on a street corner near the Civic Center, dressed in an old flannel shirt and pajama bottoms, digging through a trash can. When he finds something interesting, he either eats it or hands it to the dog curled up in the shopping cart that he’s holding onto. Guess everybody needs something to love, huh?
Every time a person passes by him, he stops digging and stares at them with his piercing blue eyes until they’ve passed. If he was Superman, he’d burn a hole right through their flesh.
“So that’s him.” I nudge Aisha. “Jesus Christ, in the flesh.”
“Have you ever talked to him?” she asks.
“No way,” I say. “He scares the shit out of me.”
“I wish you wouldn’t swear,” she says, for the second time today.
We watch him for a few minutes. He finds a Styrofoam container, the kind that restaurants give you for leftovers. He opens it and starts scarfing down whatever is inside.
The thought of eating leftover food out of a trash can turns my stomach.
“Why are you so scared of him?” Aisha asks.
The way she asks makes me feel defensive. “Just look at him,” I say. “He’s definitely not normal.”
“What’s normal?” That’s what she says. “Are you normal?”
A sensible question. I decide the most mature response right now is to ignore it.
“Besides,” she adds, “I don’t think Jesus Christ is supposed to be just like everybody else.”
I get the feeling she’s taken my nickname for this guy and run a million miles ahead of me with it. Except she’s right. Isn’t that exactly why I nicknamed this guy in the first place?
Ol’ J.C. is perfectly silent–even from this distance, you can tell he’s doing nothing but munching away. “Usually he’s yelling stuff at people,” I say.
“What does he yell?”
“Spiritual-sounding shit,” I say, forgetting, and then, quickly, “Sorry, sorry, I promise my mouth will be as clean as Pine Sol from here on out, promise.”
“Let’s go see what he’s saying,” she says.
“He’s not saying anything,” I protest. In my imagination, within seconds of approaching him, he pulls out an enormous butcher’s knife and stabs us over and over.
“Oh, he’s saying something,” she says. “Just not out loud. Yet.”
That yet sounds like she has a plan.
She heads over in his direction and literally stands right in front of him. In his face.
I’d wait to see if he freaks out but I’m the one who brought her here, so I don’t have a lot of choice except to follow her, to make sure she doesn’t get hurt.
When I reach him, J.C. has half a fry hanging out of his mouth and ketchup on his cheek and he’s staring at Aisha with that deadly stare of his that looks like it could kill minions. In addition to the dreds and the bleeding feet and the stench, that stare reminds me of, I don’t know, Freddy Krueger or something.
Maybe I misnamed him.
Then he starts talking. “I don’t understand it,” he mumbles. “I’m not hurting anybody. I’m just standing here enjoying the sun. So why do people think they have the right to steal my light?”
The strangest thing is that when he’s not yelling, his voice is very gentle. Deep and kind. Appealing, even.
“I’m sorry,” Aisha says. “I didn’t mean to block the sun. I’ll move over here.” She circles the trash can so that she’s standing next to him, instead of between him and the sun, which means he’s between me and her and I couldn’t protect her even if I wanted to. What was I thinking, bringing her here?
“It has nothing to do with where she’s standing.” Now he’s muttering, his voice on edge, beginning to sound angry. “Doesn’t she know that?”
She glances across the trash can at me and I jerk my head backwards to say, Come on, let’s go, this is hella weird. Duh, Dylan. Like it wasn’t weird before.
Then he looks right at her except he’s staring at her chest, failing to meet her eyes, and he says, “I know who you are. You take things that don’t belong to you even though you know you should sacrifice what you crave most. Don’t think you can fool God. You know this. You know what you should do. Do what he tells you.”
And right then, she starts to cry.
This girl is the strangest person I’ve ever met. One moment she’s tough as shit and the next she’s as fragile as my mother.
“What’s he telling me to do?” she asks. J.C. doesn’t answer and Aisha asks again, only there’s a begging tone in her voice. “What’s he telling me to do?”
Jesus Christ turns away from her and looks at the people passing by. He drops the Styrofoam container back in the trashcan and starts yelling, but it sounds like he’s quoting something, like bible verses or something like that: “They will take up serpents; and if they drink anything deadly, it will by no means hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
When I was a kid, I had to take catechism classes. There was this one teacher who was always talking about Jesus coming back like a thief in the night. The whole idea gave me nightmares. In them, Jesus Christ started sneaking into my house in the dead of night after we had all gone to bed. He would creep down the hallways, looking for me, while I stayed perfectly still under my blanket, trying not to breathe too loud because if I did, he would hear me. They’d always end with J.C. flying up into the blue sky, his arm firmly around me on one side and some random girl on the other side, and I’d be looking down at my house below, knowing my mother wouldn’t know where or why I’d disappeared. She would never, ever, in a million years guess that I’d been kidnapped by Jesus.
© J.L. Powers, 2007
Do not publish without permission of the author
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