An Arkansas Awakening

Lisa was surely the holiest among us. Every Sunday she would enter the chapel behind her parents, forming a processional triad of bent heads with eyes cast down. Sitting close to us but still set apart, she remained shrouded in a silence that seemed to shiver off her. Vapors off dry ice. During morning service greetings she would sometimes place a cold, limp hand in yours while you pretended to shake it, like the tail of a dead snake. But her smile captured you, and her overbite, slight and innocent, made her face somehow complete, almost pretty, and so you would stand holding the lead, gelid weight of her hand in yours while facing the warmth of her smile.

It wasn’t until Disciple Now, a long weekend of hardcore youth worship, that the cloud of her enigma began to dissipate. Still new to town, it was my first sleepover with other middle school girls, our sleeping bags aglow with flashlights. We gossiped and called it prayer, and even scanned a dirty magazine someone stole from their older cousin. And I, at long last, learned the lore of Lisa’s story.

When Lisa had turned eleven, her only brother vanished. When he went missing the whole town became a lit vigil, praying for his return, swelling with empathy. But eight days later, the news fell. He once was lost, but now was found—stabbed to death. A senseless murder without a single fingerprint in his cold blood.

No one would know his last expression, the flesh on his face having been worn and eaten away, the last look in his eyes, his last thought—terror or relief—now deep in the bellies of insects and worms. No one knew what cruel whim led Lisa to walk home on a different road from school that day, nor did they know what drew her to the ditch at all—the putrid stench or buzzing of flies perhaps or the breathless sough bellowing from his gaping mouth, an empty beer bottle singing in Morse code. In the end, he was so grotesquely mutilated by his attacker and unraveled by time that Lisa was forced to identify him by turning her gaze inward at her own visceral truth. She looked at him lying absolutely still in that lonely ditch, and she knew.

No one was sure how long she stayed with the body. No one knew whether she immediately ran screaming the last scream that would ever rend out of her, or instead stayed quietly with him alone for the last time, spellbound by the susurrant sweetgums. Perhaps her feet ran all the way back to the trailer but in reality hadn’t moved at all as she stood frozen for hours before coming back to herself from the place that stole her voice. No one had heard his cries and now she, like broken art, all at once stopped speaking to us. She now looked out at the world through her deep, glassine eyes that could never unsee and her knowing smile, so often present—the only part of her that betrayed the silence she otherwise cast with perfect precision.

Some said she blamed herself for not walking home with him from school that day. Others whispered accusations against the parents, for certainly someone was accountable. Indeed the stories rose like miasma from the mouths of the small town churchgoers dressed in department store couture.

But at our first Disciple Now evening service, it was just us youth dressed in jeans and t-shirts that read “God’s Last Name Ain’t Dammit” and “What Would Jesus Do” and “No Jesus No Peace/Know Jesus Know Peace”. With her parents back at the trailer park, Lisa stood with us, wearing a scrunchie, a white T-shirt, Mom jeans, and her usual quiet expression. We filled the pews with youth from visiting churches, some traveling as far as our inbred state cousin Texarkana.

The electric candles lining the pulpit dimmed, our chattering abated, and a young, handsome youth pastor from another church warmed us up with a prayer before bringing up our main attraction, our charismatic Christ figure, Rick Haze. With a goatee, an earring, and leather chaps over his washed denim jeans, Rick presented as a gay Henry Rollins, the kind of bad boy our church mothers warned us against. And he spoke to our small town teenage angst with a cynical deep-throated, gravel timbre. Rick got us.

A smooth synthesis of stand-up comic and radio announcer, Rick knew we were entering the world of adults without the privilege of yet being one. Nor could we claim the innocence of pure children either. We had all our teeth but had only just begun to grow body hair. Frustrated and stunted in every way, we sought the pleasures of the body without much else as competition. Our town’s cable company didn’t even get MTV, for though most of its residents couldn’t afford cable, they had voted to have it removed, citing “blacks” as their objection.

So not only did we not have access to outside culture, we also didn’t know anyone who did. There was a movie theater, a mall with stores you’ve never heard of, fast food restaurants found only in the South, seasonal high school football games, and the boonies. In the early ’90s there was no internet except for expensive dialup via AOL and Prodigy; Apple computers weren’t even close to a thing; and there were no cell phones, so long-distance was still a luxury of the wealthy.

And Rick knew this pain, our pain. He was just like us once—but back in Waco. His dad was abusive; his mother drank but tried her best until one day… See, Rick’s sharing his story, giving his testimony, opening up his life to us because, well, after turning to drugs and prostitutes, failing out of school, breaking a man’s arm, and spending some time in jail, he didn’t think his life was worth living. He even knocked up a girl, and she had had an abortion. (Pregnant pause.) Rick was beyond hope and, anyway, even if he could be helped he didn’t think he deserved it. Have any of us ever felt that way? A roomful of hands shot up, piercing the hush of the sanctuary. Well, he’s here to tell us now that there is always someone who loves you, someone who understands: Jesus Christ. Don’t give up. There’s… an Answer.

The lights above us were extinguished. In the dim contours of the aisles, Walmart versions of French intellectuals hurried past us, replete with black turtlenecks and matching pants with flat raven shoes. A soft light dawned upon them, shadowy silhouettes with their backs to us, heads bowed in an even line as if standing at an existential urinal.

Cue music.

Pervading the dark theater of our carpeted sanctuary, an ominous piano trickles out the broken chord of B-flat minor, each fifth capturing this troubled key like falling rain. Turn around… The young man at the end turns toward us, his aura dolorous, his eyes unseeing. Hanging around his neck is a sign he holds up with the word Drugs solemnly inscribed upon it. A woman appears, etheric and mesmeric, haunting and beautiful, with porcelain features and locks of mythological apple-blond hair. With the poise of a ballerina and vulnerability of an ingénue, she lightly strokes her hands over the sign, considering it with her fingers, like a blind woman reading erotic fiction. Bonnie Tyler’s velvet rasp cuts through the clumsy acoustics, Every now and then I get a little bit lonely and you’re never comin’ around… Turn around…

The second man in line turns around, offering a sign that reads Depression, and again our angelic protagonist caresses the sign with tentative allure, entranced by the lyrics booming overhead, Every now and then I get a little bit tired of listening to the sound of my tears…

Down the line, our Ophelia incarnate moves on to touch Alcohol, Sex, Abortion, and Abuse, until at last the final man turns to face us, a tall, gorgeous half Greek, half Egyptian figure holding the sign, Suicide. Turn around bright eyes… Every now and then I fall apart… Turn around…

Our golden nymphet locks eyes with this dark stranger and betrays a slight, tempted smile before dashing away, back to Drugs, leaving Death to quietly wait for his defunct, blue-eyed girl.

A great crescendo, key change, major sevens, apotheosis.

Every now and then I fall apaaaaart! And I need you now tonight! And I need you moooooore than evah!

As she moves through the line a second time, each silhouette places his sign around her neck, like a medal or a millstone, but again when she approaches the devastatingly handsome Suicide, she recoils and flees.

The men in black join hands and encircle our untouched, gamine beauty while Suicide eyes her with the smokey seduction of a small-town Cary Grant. The music switches key with a percussive thunder as she looks up at a dead sky, despondent, the whites of her eyes gibbous in the lambent light.

Once upon a time there was light in my life, but now there’s only love in the dark…

She looks out at us, through us, into us.

Nothing I can say, a total eclipse of the heart…

Suddenly, as the song clashes into its bellicose instrumental, Ophelia realizes she is surrounded by her past transgressions, literally hanging around her neck. When she struggles to break the bond between Abortion and Abuse, the circle shrinks by one as Suicide breaks his link and closes the gap behind him. She is trapped inside with him—and doesn’t even know it.

When she feels the soft black of his arms begin to wrap around her, alone with him in the dark nameless circle, she is all at once consumed with a profound madness, searching frantically, trying to break the toxic chain of linked hands enclosing her. He looks at her with the ravenous eyes of a man who is dead in every way but one. Then, a violent dance as she leaps to bolt past him, but he grips her arm, forces her to her knees, removes his Suicide sign hanging from his neck, and dangles it above her as it sways pendulously to the resounding eighties beat. He relishes this dark moment before thrusting it upon her.

Quietly in the shadows, a blond man towering over us like a Nordic god makes his way toward the shadow-circle. The sheet draped over his 6’8 frame has an arresting effect, a walking statue of David—in a toga. With the grand, swelling burst of harmony, our heroine meets the climax of her struggle with Death: I really need you tonight! Foreeeeeever’s gonna start tonight! Foreeeeeever’s gonna start to…night…

Dramatically, Jesus extends his hand to her, a celestial light beams down, and the black circle falls to the ground, with Suicide standing above our darling.

With a well-rehearsed brush of Jesus’ hand, Suicide falls away in homoerotic surrender, and our handsome Aryan hero lifts our sweet maiden into his arms and carries her off: two fair, flaxen children of God, like a pair of Flemish angels, slowly moving away from the darkest night into the distant glow.

Turn around bright eyes…

The sanctuary was silent.

Then, out of all of us, it was Lisa who we heard, crying like a wounded animal.

“Darlin’,” Rick’s coarse baritone finessed the room over the speakers. “God loves you. Whatever you’re feeling, whatever you’ve experienced, you’re not alone.” He was sitting on a stool next to the lectern holding a mic, like Tony Bennett about to set up a ballad in a smoke-filled nightclub. “For all of you who feel lost, afraid, hopeless. There’s a place for you. And right now, it’s here, right on this stage. Won’t you come bow before the Lord, and let Him transform your heart and open your spirit to the Truth?”

Truth.